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Essay Topics on Racism: 150 Ideas for Analysis and Discussion

Here’s a list of 150 essay ideas on racism to help you ace a perfect paper. The subjects are divided based on what you require!

Before we continue with the list of essay topics on racism, let's remember the definition of racism. In brief, it's a complex prejudice and a form of discrimination based on race. It can be done by an individual, a group, or an institution. If you belong to a racial or ethnic group, you are facing being in the minority. As it's usually caused by the group in power, there are many types of racism, including socio-cultural racism, internal racism, legal racism, systematic racism, interpersonal racism, institutional racism, and historical racism. You can also find educational or economic racism as there are many sub-sections that one can encounter.

150 Essay Topics on Racism to Help You Ace a Perfect Essay

General Recommendations

The subject of racism is one of the most popular among college students today because you can discuss it regardless of your academic discipline. Even though we are dealing with technical progress and the Internet, the problem of racism is still there. The world may go further and talk about philosophical matters, yet we still have to face them and explore the challenges. It makes it even more difficult to find a good topic that would be unique and inspiring. As a way to help you out, we have collected 150 racism essay topics that have been chosen by our experts. We recommend you choose something that motivates you and narrow things down a little bit to make your writing easier.

Why Choose a Topic on Racial Issues? 

When we explore racial issues, we are not only seeking the most efficient solutions but also reminding ourselves about the past and the mistakes that we should never make again. It is an inspirational type of work as we all can change the world. If you cannot choose a topic that inspires you, think about recent events, talk about your friend, or discuss something that has happened in your local area. Just take your time and think about how you can make the world a safer and better place.

The Secrets of a Good Essay About Racism 

The secret to writing a good essay on racism is not only stating that racism is bad but by exploring the origins and finding a solution. You can choose a discipline and start from there. For example, if you are a nursing student, talk about the medical principles and responsibilities where every person is the same. Talk about how it has not always been this way and discuss the methods and the famous theorists who have done their best to bring equality to our society. Keep your tone inspiring, explore, and tell a story with a moral lesson in the end. Now let’s explore the topic ideas on racism!

General Essay Topics On Racism 

As we know, no person is born a racist since we are not born this way and it cannot be considered a biological phenomenon. Since it is a practice that is learned and a social issue, the general topics related to racism may include socio-cultural, philosophical, and political aspects as you can see below. Here are the ideas that you should consider as you plan to write an essay on racial issues:

• Are we born with racial prejudice? 
• Can racism be unlearned? 
• The political constituent of the racial prejudice and the colonial past? 
• The humiliation of the African continent and the control of power. 
• The heritage of the Black Lives Matter movement and its historical origins. 
• The skin color issue and the cultural perceptions of the African Americans vs Mexican Americans. 
• The role of social media in the prevention of racial conflicts in 2022 . 
• Martin Luther King Jr. and his role in modern education. 
• Konrad Lorenz and the biological perception of the human race. 
• The relation of racial issues to nazism and chauvinism.

The Best Racism Essay Topics 

School and college learners often ask about what can be considered the best essay subject when asked to write on racial issues. Essentially, you have to talk about the origins of racism and provide a moral lesson with a solution as every person can be a solid contribution to the prevention of hatred and racial discrimination.

• The schoolchildren's example and the attitude to the racial conflicts. 
• Perception of racism in the United States versus Germany. 
• The role of the scouting movement as a way to promote equality in our society. 
•  Social justice and the range of opportunities that African American individuals could receive during the 1960s.
•  The workplace equality and the negative perception of the race when the documents are being filed. 
•  The institutional racism and the sources of the legislation that has paved the way for injustice. 
•  Why should we talk to the children about racial prejudice and set good examples ? 
•  The role of anthropology in racial research during the 1990s in the USA. 
•  The Black Poverty phenomenon and the origins of the Black Culture across the globe. 
•  The controversy of Malcolm X’s personality and his transition from anger to peacemaking.

Shocking Racism Essay Ideas 

Unfortunately, there are many subjects that are not easy to deal with when you are talking about the most horrible sides of racism. Since these subjects are sensitive, dealing with the shocking aspects of this problem should be approached with a warning in your introduction part so your readers know what to expect. As a rule, many medical and forensic students will dive into the issue, so these topic ideas are still relevant:

• The prejudice against wearing a hoodie. 
•  The racial violence in Western Africa and the crimes by the Belgian government. 
•  The comparison of homophobic beliefs and the link to racial prejudice. 
•  Domestic violence and the bias towards the cases based on race. 
•  Racial discrimination in the field of the sex industry. 
•  Slavery in the Middle East and the modern cultural perceptions. 
•  Internal racism in the United States: why the black communities keep silent. 
•  Racism in the American schools: the bias among the teachers. 
•  Cyberbullying and the distorted image of the typical racists . 
•  The prisons of Apartheid in South Africa.

Light and Simple Ideas Regarding Racism

If you are a high-school learner or a first-year college student, your essay on racism may not have to represent complex research with a dozen of sources. Here are some good ideas that are light and simple enough to provide you with inspiration and the basic points to follow:

• My first encounter with racial prejudice. 
•  Why do college students are always in the vanguard of social campaigns? 
•  How are the racial issues addressed by my school? 
•  The promotion of the African-American culture is a method to challenge prejudice and stereotypes. 
• The history of blues music and the Black culture of the blues in the United States.
• The role of slavery in the Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. 
•  School segregation in the United States during the 1960s. 
•  The negative effect of racism on the mental health of a person. 
•  The advocacy of racism in modern society . 
•  The heritage of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the modern perception of the historical issues.

Interesting Topics on Racism For an Essay 

Contrary to the popular belief, when you have to talk about the cases of racial prejudice, you will also encounter many interesting essay topic ideas. As long as these are related to your main academic course, you can explore them. Here are some great ideas to consider:

• Has the perception of Michael Jackson changed because of his skin transition? 
•  The perception of racial problems by the British Broadcasting Corporation. 
•  The role of the African American influencers on Instagram. 
•  The comparison between the Asian students and the Mexican learners in the USA. 
•  Latin culture and the similarities when compared to the Black culture with its peculiarities. 
•  The racial impact in the “Boy In The Stripped Pajamas”. 
•  Can we eliminate racism completely and how exactly, considering the answer is “Yes”? 
•  Scientific research of modern racism and social media campaigns. 
•  Why do some people believe that the Black Lives Matter movement is controversial? 
• Male vs female challenges in relation to racial attitudes.

Argumentative Essay Topics About Race 

An argumentative type of writing requires making a clear statement or posing an assumption that will deal with a particular question. As we are dealing with racial prejudice or theories, it is essential to support your writing with at least one piece of evidence to make sure that you can support your opinion and stand for it as you write. Here are some good African American argumentative essay examples of topics and other ideas to consider:

•  Racism is a mental disorder and cannot be treated with words alone. 
•  Analysis of the traumatic experiences based on racial prejudice. 
•  African-American communities and the sense of being inferior are caused by poverty. 
•  Reading the memoirs of famous people that describe racial issues often provides a distorted image through the lens of a single person. 
•  There is no academic explanation of racism since every case is different and is often based on personal perceptions. 
•  The negatives of the post-racial perception as the latent system that advocates racism. 
•  The link of racial origins to the concept of feminism and gender inequality. 
•  The military bias and the merits that are earned by the African-American soldiers. 
•  The media causes a negative image of the Latin and Mexican youth in the United States. 
•  Does racism exist in kindergarten and why the youngsters do not think about racial prejudice?

Racism Research Paper Topics 

Dealing with The Black Lives Matter essay , you should focus on those aspects of racism that are not often discussed or researched by the media. You can take a particular case study or talk about the reasons why the BLM social campaign has started and whether the timing has been right. Here are some interesting racism topics for research paper that you should consider:

• The link of criminal offenses to race is an example of the primary injustice .  
• The socio-emotional burdens of slavery that one can trace among the representatives of the African-American population. 
• Study of the cardio-vascular diseases among the American youth: a comparison of the Caucasian and Latin representatives. 
• The race and the politics: dealing with the racial issues and the Trump administration analysis. 
• The best methods to achieve medical equality for all people: where race has no place to be. 
• The perception of racism by the young children: the negative side of trying to educate the youngsters. 
• Racial prejudice in the UK vs the United States: analysis of the core differences. 
• The prisons in the United States: why do the Blacks constitute the majority? 
• The culture of Voodoo and the slavery: the link between the occult practices.
• The native American people and the African Americans: the common woes they share.

Racism in Culture Topics 

Racism topics for essay in culture are always upon the surface because we can encounter them in books, popular political shows, movies, social media, and more. The majority of college students often ignore this aspect because things easily become confusing since one has to take a stand and explain the point. As a way to help you a little bit, we have collected several cultural racism topic ideas to help you start:

• The perception of wealth by the Black community: why it differs when researched through the lens of past poverty?  
• The rap music and the cultural constituent of the African-American community. 
• The moral constituent of the political shows where racial jargon is being used. 
• Why the racial jokes on television are against the freedom of speech?  
• The ways how the modern media promotes racism by stirring up the conflict and actually doing harm. 
• The isolated cases of racism and police violence in the United States as portrayed by the movies. 
• Playing with the Black musicians: the history of jazz in the United States. 
• The social distancing and the perception of isolation by the different races. 
• The cultural multitude in the cartoons by the Disney Corporations: the pros and cons.
• From assimilation to genocide: can the African American child make it big without living through the cultural bias?

Racism Essay Ideas in Literature 

One of the best ways to study racism is by reading the books by those who have been through it on their own or by studying the explorations by those who can write emotionally and fight for racial equality where racism has no place to be. Keeping all of these challenges in mind, our experts suggest turning to the books as you can explore racism in the literature by focusing on those who are against it and discussing the cases in the classic literature that are quite controversial.

• The racial controversy of Ernest Hemingway's writing.  
• The personal attitude of Mark Twain towards slavery and the cultural peculiarities of the times. 
• The reasons why "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee book has been banned in libraries. 
• The "Hate You Give" by Angie Thomas and the analysis of the justified and "legit" racism. 
• Is the poetry by the gangsta rap an example of hidden racism? 
• Maya Angelou and her timeless poetry. 
• The portrayal of xenophobia in modern English language literature. 
• What can we learn from the "Schilder's List" screenplay as we discuss the subject of genocide? 
• Are there racial elements in "Othello" or Shakespeare's creation is beyond the subject?
• Kate Chopin's perception of inequality in "Desiree's Baby".

Racism in Science Essay Ideas 

Racism is often studied by scientists because it's not only a cultural point or a social agenda that is driven by personal inferiority and similar factors of mental distortion. Since we can talk about police violence and social campaigns, it is also possible to discuss things through different disciplines. Think over these racism thesis statement ideas by taking a scientific approach and getting a common idea explained:

• Can physical trauma become a cause for a different perception of race? 
• Do we inherit racial intolerance from our family members and friends? 
• Can a white person assimilate and become a part of the primarily Black community? 
• The people behind the concept of Apartheid: analysis of the critical factors. 
• Can one prove the fact of the physical damage of the racial injustice that lasted through the years? 
• The bond between mental diseases and the slavery heritage among the Black people. 
• Should people carry the blame for the years of social injustice? 
• How can we explain the metaphysics of race? 
• What do the different religions tell us about race and the best ways to deal with it? 
• Ethnic prejudices based on age, gender, and social status vs general racism.

Cinema and Race Topics to Write About 

As a rule, the movies are also a great source for writing an essay on racial issues. Remember to provide the basic information about the movie or include examples with the quotations to help your readers understand all the major points that you make. Here are some ideas that are worth your attention:

• The negative aspect of the portrayal of racial issues by Hollywood.  
• Should the disturbing facts and the graphic violence be included in the movies about slavery? 
• Analysis of the "Green Mile" movie and the perception of equality in our society.  
• The role of music and culture in the "Django Unchained" movie. 
• The "Ghosts of Mississippi" and the social aspect of the American South compared to how we perceive it today. 
• What can we learn from the "Malcolm X" movie created by Spike Lee? 
• "I am Not Your Negro" movie and the role of education through the movies. 
• "And the Children Shall Lead" the movie as an example that we are not born racist. 
• Do we really have the "Black Hollywood" concept in reality? 
• Do the movies about racial issues only cause even more racial prejudice?

Race and Ethnic Relations 

Another challenging problem is the internal racism and race and ethnicity essay topics that we can observe not only in the United States but all over the world as well. For example, the Black people in the United States and the representatives of the rap music culture will divide themselves between the East Coast and the West Coast where far more than cultural differences exist. The same can be encountered in Afghanistan or in Belgium. Here are some essay topics on race and ethnicity idea samples to consider:

• The racial or the ethnic conflict? What can we learn from Afghan society? 
• Religious beliefs divide us based on ethnicity . 
• What are the major differences between ethnic and racial conflicts? 
• Why we are able to identify the European Black person and the Black coming from the United States? 
• Racism and ethnicity's role in sports. 
• How can an ethnic conflict be resolved with the help of anti-racial methods? 
• The medical aspect of being an Asian in the United States. 
• The challenges of learning as an African American person during the 1950s. 
• The role of the African American people in the Vietnam war and their perception by the locals. 
• Ethnicity's role in South Africa as the concept of Apartheid has been formed.

Biology and Racial Issues 

If you are majoring in Biology or would like to research this side of the general issue of race, it is essential to think about how we can fight racism in practice by turning to healthcare or the concepts that are historical in their nature. Although we cannot explain slavery per se other than by turning to economics and the rule of power that has no justification, biologists believe that racial challenges can be approached by their core beliefs as well.

• Can we create an isolated non-racist society in 2022? 
• If we assume that a social group has never heard of racism, can it occur? 
• The physical versus cultural differences in the racial inequality cases? 
• The biological peculiarities of the different races? 
• Do we carry the cultural heritage of our race? 
• Interracial marriage through the lens of Biology. 
• The origins of the racial concept and its evolution. 
• The core ways how slavery has changed the African-American population. 
• The linguistic peculiarities of the Latin people. 
• The resistance of the different races towards vaccination.

Modern Racism Topics to Consider 

In case you would like to deal with a modern subject that deals with racism, you can go beyond the famous Black Lives Matter movement by focusing on the cases of racism in sports or talking about the peacemakers or the famous celebrities who have made a solid difference in the elimination of racism.

• The Global Citizen campaign is a way to eliminate racial differences. 
• The heritage of Aretha Franklin and her take on the racial challenges. 
• The role of the Black Stars in modern society: the pros and cons. 
• Martin Luther King Day in the modern schools. 
• How can Instagram help to eliminate racism? 
• The personality of Michelle Obama as a fighter for peace. 
• Is a society without racism a utopian idea? 
• How can comic books help youngsters understand equality? 
• The controversy in the death of George Floyd. 
• How can we break down the stereotypes about Mexicans in the United States?

Racial Discrimination Essay Ideas 

If your essay should focus on racial discrimination, you should think about the environment and the type of prejudice that you are facing. For example, it can be in school or at the workplace, at the hospital, or in a movie that you have attended. Here are some discrimination topics research paper ideas that will help you to get started:

• How can a schoolchild report the case of racism while being a minor?  
• The discrimination against women's rights during the 1960s. 
• The employment problem and the chances of the Latin, Asian, and African American applicants. 
• Do colleges implement a certain selection process against different races? 
• How can discrimination be eliminated via education? 
• African-American challenges in sports. 
• The perception of discrimination, based on racial principles and the laws in the United States. 
• How can one report racial comments on social media? 
• Is there discrimination against white people in our society? 
• Covid-19 and racial discrimination: the lessons we have learned.

Find Even More Essay Topics On Racism by Visiting Our Site 

If you are unsure about what to write about, you can always find an essay on racism by visiting our website. Offering over 150 topic ideas, you can always get in touch with our experts and find another one!

5 Tips to Make Your Essay Perfect

• Start your essay on racial issues by narrowing things down after you choose the general topic. 
• Get your facts straight by checking the dates, the names, opinions from both sides of an issue, etc. 
• Provide examples if you are talking about the general aspects of racism. 
• Do not use profanity and show due respect even if you are talking about shocking things. The same relates to race and ethnic relations essay topics that are based on religious conflicts. Stay respectful! 
• Provide references and citations to avoid plagiarism and to keep your ideas supported by at least one piece of evidence.

Recommendations to Help You Get Inspired

Speaking of recommended books and articles to help you start with this subject, you should check " The Ideology of Racism: Misusing Science to Justify Racial Discrimination " by William H. Tucker who is a professor of social sciences at Rutgers University. Once you read this great article, think about the poetry by Maya Angelou as one of the best examples to see the practical side of things.

The other recommendations worth checking include:

- How to be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi . - White Fragility by Robin Diangelo . - So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo .

The Final Word 

We sincerely believe that our article has helped you to choose the perfect essay subject to stir your writing skills. If you are still feeling stuck and need additional help, our team of writers can assist you in the creation of any essay based on what you would like to explore. You can get in touch with our skilled experts anytime by contacting our essay service for any race and ethnicity topics. Always confidential and plagiarism-free, we can assist you and help you get over the stress!

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SCOTUS Says You Can Discuss Race in Your College Essay. Should You?

The us supreme court banned colleges’ affirmative action admission practices, raising a question about students writing about race in their college essay.

Although the Supreme Court says college application essays may discuss race and disadvantage, BU experts say inauthentic or traumatic recollections won’t cut it. Photo by Delmaine Donson/iStock

Should You Discuss Race in Your College Essay?

“Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts

“The student must be treated based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race. Many universities have for too long done just the opposite. …Universities may not simply establish through application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today.”—Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts

Confused? So are many in higher education. When the United States Supreme Court sacked affirmative action racial preferences in June, Chief Justice John Roberts’ majority opinion, while spotlighting applicants’ personal essays, also put vague guardrails around their use. And anyway, not every young person who has suffered racial discrimination wants to revisit it in their essay, that critical part of applying to college where students tell their story in their voice. 

After the SCOTUS decision, the advice from Boston University admissions and college guidance experts is this: your story must always be authentic. It can be about discrimination or other challenges met and dealt with, but it need not be. And it shouldn’t be , if writing about it means revisiting traumatic experiences.

“The essay for us is just going to continue to be as important as it always was,” notwithstanding the new legal landscape, says Kelly Walter (Wheelock’81), BU dean of admissions and associate vice president for enrollment. She has discussed the ruling with the University’s legal office, she says, and her office has tweaked BU’s two essay question options applicants must choose from. (The University also asks potential future Terriers to complete the Common Application for college, which has its own essay requirement.) The tweaks were partly in response to the court ruling, Walter says, but also to ensure that the questions conveyed to students “what BU stood for, and that we value diversity. We thought it was very important to put that out there front and center, and for them to be able to specifically respond to our commitment, our values, as it relates to one of these two essay questions.” 

Those questions are:

Reflect on a social or community issue that deeply resonates with you. Why is it important to you, and how have you been involved in addressing or raising awareness about it? What about being a student at BU most excites you? How do you hope to contribute to our campus community?

While the chief justice exhorted students to share discrimination episodes in answering such questions, recent alum and current student Erika Decklar (Sargent’22, SPH’24) says that may not be comfortable for some. She is an advisor with BU Admissions College Advising Corps (CAC-BU) , which gives college application counseling to low-income and other marginalized high schoolers.

“In my experience,” Decklar says, “students from marginalized backgrounds gravitate towards writing college essays on traumatic experiences, whether they are comfortable sharing these experiences with admissions counselors or not. We have always advised and encouraged students to write about a topic that highlights their strengths, personalities, and passions—whether it is a ‘resiliency’ essay or an essay about their culture, values, or a unique passion.”

After the SCOTUS ruling, Decklar says, her advice to students has not changed. “We should continue motivating students to write about a passion, something that makes them unique, but not coach them to write about their traumatic experiences.” 

Katie Hill, who directs CAC-BU, says applicants sharing in their essays what makes them special “does not require them revisiting their pain. If students so choose, we can help them write about their families and cultures, what is beautiful and makes them proud to be” of that culture.

Students from marginalized backgrounds gravitate towards writing college essays on traumatic experiences, whether they are comfortable sharing these experiences with admissions counselors or not. Erika Deklar (Sargent’22, SPH’24)

But what BIPOC (Black, indigenous, people of color) students do not need, Hill says, is to hear from their advisors that in order to get into college, they need to open themselves up beyond their comfortable boundaries.

Walter agrees that an applicant’s story need not be an unrelenting nightmare. It’s true that some of them “are sharing things about their personal lives that I’m not sure I would have seen 20 years ago,” she says. “Students are certainly talking about their sexual identity in their essays. And some will say to us, ‘I’m telling you this [about my identity], and my parents don’t know yet.’” 

But she can reel off the opening lines from three of her favorite essays over the years that were hardly gloomy. One began, Geeks come in many varieties. “We laughed. It makes you want to keep reading,” she says. Then there was the woman who started, Life is short, and so am I.  

The third: By day, Louis is my trusty companion; by night, my partner in crime. “Doesn’t that make you want to read more and find out who or what Louis is?” Walter asks. (He was the applicant’s first car, a metaphor for this woman’s passion for the independence it conveyed, preparing her for the next step of going to BU, where she indeed matriculated.)

The essay is so important because it’s a given that applicants to BU can manage the academics here. “We have 80,000 students applying for admission to Boston University [annually],” Walter says, “and I think it’s fair to say that the vast majority of them can do the work academically. We’re also shaping and building a class.

“For some, it may be leadership. For some, it may be their cultural background. For others, it might be writing for the Daily Free Press. We really want to think about a wide variety of students in our first-year class.” The essay fills in blanks about applicants for admission, along with teacher and counselor recommendations, their high school activities, and their internships or jobs. 

That’s not to say there aren’t lethal don’ts to avoid, most of them emphasizing the necessity of having a proofreader.

“We often get references to ‘Boston College,’” says Patrice Oppliger , a College of Communication assistant professor of communication, who solicits faculty reviews of applicants to COM’s mass communication, advertising, and public relations master’s program before making a decision.

And need we say, do your own work? Walter recalls an essay from a couple of years back where the applicant discussed life in Warren Towers. “And I was like, wait, you couldn’t have lived in Warren Towers, you’re not here yet. And it became very clear that the parent, who was an alum—I think in an effort to help—was telling her story. And somehow no one [in that family] caught that.”

So writing about dealing with discrimination, race-based or otherwise, is fine if it’s not traumatic for you to revisit— and if it’s authentic. Authenticity also includes avoiding over-reliance on artificial intelligence in crafting your essay. According to Admissions’ AI statement ,

If you opt to use these tools at any point while writing your essays, they should only be used to support your original ideas rather than to write your essays in their entirety. As potential future Terriers, we expect all applicants to adhere to the same standards of academic honesty and integrity as our current students. When representing the words or ideas of another in their original work, students should properly credit the source.

“We want to think about not just who will thrive academically at BU,” Walter says, “but also who will enrich the University community and make diverse contributions.”

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How to Talk About Race on College Applications, According to Admissions Experts

R afael Figueroa, dean of college guidance at Albuquerque Academy, was in the middle of tutoring Native American and Native Hawaiian students on how to write college application essays when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious college admissions processes at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional .

Earlier in the week, he told the students that they shouldn’t feel like they need to talk about their ethnicity in their essays. But after the June 29 Supreme Court ruling , he backtracked. “If I told you that you didn’t have to write about your native or cultural identity, you need to get ready to do another supplemental essay” on it or prepare a story that can fit into short answer questions, he says he told them.

For high school seniors of color applying to colleges in the coming years, the essay and short answer sections will take on newfound importance. Chief Justice John Roberts suggested as much when he wrote in his majority opinion, “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.” That “discussion” is usually in an essay, and many colleges have additional short-answer questions that allow students to expand more on their background and where they grew up.

“The essay is going to take up a lot more space than maybe it has in the past because people are going to be really trying to understand who this person is that is going to come into our community,” says Timothy Fields, senior associate dean of undergraduate admission at Emory University.

Now, college admissions officers are trying to figure out how to advise high schoolers on their application materials to give them the best chance to showcase their background under the new rules, which will no longer allow colleges or universities to use race as an explicit factor in admissions decisions .

Shereem Herndon-Brown, who co-wrote The Black Family’s Guide to College Admissions with Fields, says students of color can convey their racial and ethnic backgrounds by writing about their families and their upbringing. “I’ve worked with students for years who have written amazing essays about how they spend Yom Kippur with their family, which clearly signals to a college that they are Jewish—how they listened to the conversations from their grandfather about escaping parts of Europe… Their international or immigrant story comes through whether it’s from the Holocaust or Croatia or the Ukraine. These are stories that kind of smack colleges in the face about culture.”

“Right now, we’re asking Black and brown kids to smack colleges in the face about being Black and brown,” he continues. “And, admittedly, I am mixed about the necessity to do it. But I think the only way to do it is through writing.”

Read More: The ‘Infamous 96’ Know Firsthand What Happens When Affirmative Action Is Banned

Students of color who are involved in extracurriculars that are related to diversity efforts should talk about those prominently in their college essays, other experts say. Maude Bond, director of college counseling at Cate School in Santa Barbara County, California, cites one recent applicant she counseled who wrote her college essay about an internship with an anti-racism group and how it helped her highlight the experiences of Asian American Pacific Islanders in the area.

Bond also says there are plenty of ways for people of color to emphasize their resilience and describe the character traits they learned from overcoming adversity: “Living in a society where you’re navigating racism every day makes you very compassionate.” she says. “It gives you a different sense of empathy and understanding. Not having the same resources as people that you grow up with makes you more creative and innovative.” These, she argues, are characteristics students should highlight in their personal essays.

Adam Nguyen, a former Columbia University admissions officer who now counsels college applicants via his firm Ivy Link, will also encourage students of color to ask their teachers and college guidance counselors to hint at their race or ethnicity in their recommendation letters. “That’s where they could talk about your racial background,” Nguyen says. “Just because you can’t see what’s written doesn’t mean you can’t influence how or what is said about you.”

Yet as the essay portions of college applications gain more importance, the process of reading applications will take a lot longer, raising the question of whether college admissions offices have enough staffers to get through the applications. “There are not enough admission officers in the industry to read that way,” says Michael Pina, director of admission at the University of Richmond.

That could make it even more difficult for students to get the individual attention required to gain acceptance to the most elite colleges. Multiple college admissions experts say college-bound students will need to apply to a broader range of schools. “You should still apply to those 1% of colleges…but you should think about the places that are producing high-quality graduates that are less selective,” says Pina.

One thing more Black students should consider, Fields argues, is applying to historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). (In fact, Fields, a graduate of Morehouse College, claims that may now be “necessary” for some students.) “There’s something to be said, for a Black person to be in a majority environment someplace that they are celebrated, not tolerated,” Fields says. “There’s something to be said about being in an environment where you don’t have to justify why you’re here.”

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An Essay for Teachers Who Understand Racism Is Real

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This essay is not to enumerate the recent murders of Black people by police, justify why protest and uprising are important for social change, or remind us why NFL player Colin Kaepernick took a knee. If you have missed those points, blamed victims, or proclaimed “All Lives Matter,” this article is not for you, and you may want to ask yourself whether you should be teaching any children, especially Black children.

This article is for teachers who understand that racism is real, anti-Blackness is real, and state-sanctioned violence, which allows police to kill Black people with impunity, is real. It is for teachers who know change is necessary and want to understand exactly what kind of change we need as a country.

Politicians who know the words “justice” and “equity” only when they want peace in the streets are going to try to persuade us that they are capable of reforming centuries of oppression by changing policies, adding more accountability measures, and removing the “bad apples” from among police.

More From This Author:

“Teachers, We Cannot Go Back to the Way Things Were” “White Teachers Need Anti-Racist Therapy” “How Schools Are ‘Spirit Murdering’ Black and Brown Students” “Dear White Teachers: You Can’t Love Your Black Students If You Don’t Know Them” “‘Grit Is in Our DNA': Why Teaching Grit Is Inherently Anti-Black”

These actions will sound comprehensive and, with time, a solution to injustice. These reforms may even reduce police killings or school suspensions of Black students, but as civil rights activist Ella Baker said, a “reduction of injustice is not the same as freedom.” Reformists want incremental change, but Black lives are being lost with every day we wait. And to be Black is to live in a constant state of exhaustion.

Centuries of Black resistance and protest have had a profound impact on the nation. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of “The 1619 Project,” points out, “We have helped the country to live up to its founding ideals. ... Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different—it might not be a democracy at all.” Those civil rights achievements were critical, including the reformist ones.

But reform is no longer enough. Too often, reform is rooted in Whiteness because it appeases White liberals who need to see change but want to maintain their status, power, and supremacy.

Abolition of oppression is needed because reform still did not stop a police officer from putting his knee on George Floyd’s neck in broad daylight for 8 minutes and 46 seconds; it did not stop police from killing Breonna Taylor in her own home. Also that: Largely non-White school districts get $23 billion less in state and local funding than predominantly White ones; Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for 26 percent of the deaths from COVID-19; and with only 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population. We need to be honest: We cannot reform something this monstrous; we have to abolish it.

Abolitionist Resources From Bettina L. Love

Organizations

• Free Minds, Free People
• Critical Resistance
• Black Youth Project 100
• Quetzal Education Consulting
• Assata’s Daughters
• Black Organizing Project
• Teachers 4 Social Justice
• “Reading Towards Abolition: A Reading List on Policing, Rebellion, and the Criminalization of Blackness”

Abolitionists want to eliminate what is oppressive, not reform it, not reimagine it, but remove oppression by its roots. Abolitionists want to understand the conditions that normalize oppression and uproot those conditions, too. Abolitionists, in the words of scholar and activist Bill Ayers, “demand the impossible” and work to build a world rooted in the possibilities of justice. Abolitionists are not anarchists because, as we eliminate these systems, we want to build conditions that create institutions that are just, loving, equitable, and center Black lives.

Abolitionism is not a social-justice trend. It is a way of life defined by commitment to working toward a humanity where no one is disposable, prisons no longer exist, being Black is not a crime, teachers have high expectations for Black and Brown children, and joy is seen as a foundation of learning.

Abolitionists strive for that reality by fighting for a divestment of law enforcement to redistribute funds to education, housing, jobs, and health care; elimination of high-stakes testing; replacement of watered-down and Eurocentric materials from educational publishers like Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with community-created standards and curriculum; the end of police presence in schools; employment of Black teachers en masse; hiring of therapists and counselors who believe Black lives matter in schools; destruction of inner-city schools that resemble prisons; and elimination of suspension in favor of restorative justice.

Abolitionist work is hard and demands an indomitable spirit of resistance. As a nation, we saw this spirit in Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. We also see it in 21st-century abolitionists like Angela Davis, Charlene Carruthers, Erica Meiners, Derecka Purnell, David Stovall, and Farima Pour-Khorshid.

For non-Black people, abolitionism requires giving up the idea of being an “ally” to become a “co-conspirator.” Many social-justice groups have shifted the language to “co-conspirator” because allies work toward something that is mutually beneficial and supportive to all parties. Co-conspirators, in contrast, understand how Whiteness and privilege work in our society and leverage their power, privilege, and resources in solidarity with justice movements to dismantle White supremacy. Co-conspirators function as verbs, not as nouns.

The journey for abolitionists and our co-conspirators is arduous, but we fight for a future that will never need to be reformed again because it was built as just from the beginning.

Related Video

In 2016, Bettina L. Love, the author of this essay, spoke to Education Week about African-American girls and discipline. Here’s what she had to say:

A version of this article appeared in the June 17, 2020 edition of Education Week as For Teachers Who Understand Racism Is Real

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14 influential essays from Black writers on America's problems with race

• Business leaders are calling for people to reflect on civil rights this Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
• Black literary experts shared their top nonfiction essay and article picks on race. 
• The list includes "A Report from Occupied Territory" by James Baldwin.

For many, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a time of reflection on the life of one of the nation's most prominent civil rights leaders. It's also an important time for people who support racial justice to educate themselves on the experiences of Black people in America. 

Business leaders like TIAA CEO Thasunda Duckett Brown and others are encouraging people to reflect on King's life's work, and one way to do that is to read his essays and the work of others dedicated to the same mission he had: racial equity. 

Insider asked Black literary and historical experts to share their favorite works of journalism on race by Black authors. Here are the top pieces they recommended everyone read to better understand the quest for Black liberation in America:

An earlier version of this article was published on June 14, 2020.

"Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases" and "The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States" by Ida B. Wells

In 1892, investigative journalist, activist, and NAACP founding member Ida B. Wells began to publish her research on lynching in a pamphlet titled "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases." Three years later, she followed up with more research and detail in "The Red Record." 

Shirley Moody-Turner, associate Professor of English and African American Studies at Penn State University recommended everyone read these two texts, saying they hold "many parallels to our own moment."  

"In these two pamphlets, Wells exposes the pervasive use of lynching and white mob violence against African American men and women. She discredits the myths used by white mobs to justify the killing of African Americans and exposes Northern and international audiences to the growing racial violence and terror perpetrated against Black people in the South in the years following the Civil War," Moody-Turner told Business Insider. 

Read  "Southern Horrors" here and "The Red Record" here >>

"On Juneteenth" by Annette Gordon-Reed

In this collection of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed combines memoir and history to help readers understand the complexities out of which Juneteenth was born. She also argues how racial and ethnic hierarchies remain in society today, said Moody-Turner. 

"Gordon-Reed invites readers to see Juneteenth as a time to grapple with the complexities of race and enslavement in the US, to re-think our origin stories about race and slavery's central role in the formation of both Texas and the US, and to consider how, as Gordon-Reed so eloquently puts it, 'echoes of the past remain, leaving their traces in the people and events of the present and future.'"

Purchase "On Juneteenth" here>>

"The Case for Reparations" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates, best-selling author and national correspondent for The Atlantic, made waves when he published his 2014 article "The Case for Reparations," in which he called for "collective introspection" on reparations for Black Americans subjected to centuries of racism and violence. 

"In his now famed essay for The Atlantic, journalist, author, and essayist, Ta-Nehisi Coates traces how slavery, segregation, and discriminatory racial policies underpin ongoing and systemic economic and racial disparities," Moody-Turner said. 

"Coates provides deep historical context punctuated by individual and collective stories that compel us to reconsider the case for reparations," she added.  

Read it here>>

"The Idea of America" by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the "1619 Project" by The New York Times

In "The Idea of America," Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones traces America's history from 1619 onward, the year slavery began in the US. She explores how the history of slavery is inseparable from the rise of America's democracy in her essay that's part of The New York Times' larger "1619 Project," which is the outlet's ongoing project created in 2019 to re-examine the impact of slavery in the US. 

"In her unflinching look at the legacy of slavery and the underside of American democracy and capitalism, Hannah-Jones asks, 'what if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we [Black Americans] have never been the problem but the solution,'" said Moody-Turner, who recommended readers read the whole "1619 Project" as well. 

Read "The Idea of America" here and the rest of the "1619 Project here>>

"Many Thousands Gone" by James Baldwin

In "Many Thousands Gone," James Arthur Baldwin, American novelist, playwright, essayist, poet, and activist lays out how white America is not ready to fully recognize Black people as people. It's a must read, according to Jimmy Worthy II, assistant professor of English at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

"Baldwin's essay reminds us that in America, the very idea of Black persons conjures an amalgamation of specters, fears, threats, anxieties, guilts, and memories that must be extinguished as part of the labor to forget histories deemed too uncomfortable to remember," Worthy said.

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail" by Martin Luther King Jr.

On April 13 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. and other Civil Rights activists were arrested after peaceful protest in Birmingham, Alabama. In jail, King penned an open letter about how people have a moral obligation to break unjust laws rather than waiting patiently for legal change. In his essay, he expresses criticism and disappointment in white moderates and white churches, something that's not often focused on in history textbooks, Worthy said.

"King revises the perception of white racists devoted to a vehement status quo to include white moderates whose theories of inevitable racial equality and silence pertaining to racial injustice prolong discriminatory practices," Worthy said. 

"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" by Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde, African American writer, feminist, womanist, librarian, and civil rights activist asks readers to not be silent on important issues. This short, rousing read is crucial for everyone according to Thomonique Moore, a 2016 graduate of Howard University, founder of Books&Shit book club, and an incoming Masters' candidate at Columbia University's Teacher's College. 

"In this essay, Lorde explains to readers the importance of overcoming our fears and speaking out about the injustices that are plaguing us and the people around us. She challenges us to not live our lives in silence, or we risk never changing the things around us," Moore said.  Read it here>>

"The First White President" by Ta-Nehisi Coates

This essay from the award-winning journalist's book " We Were Eight Years in Power ," details how Trump, during his presidency, employed the notion of whiteness and white supremacy to pick apart the legacy of the nation's first Black president, Barack Obama.

Moore said it was crucial reading to understand the current political environment we're in. 

"Just Walk on By" by Brent Staples

In this essay, Brent Staples, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer for The New York Times, hones in on the experience of racism against Black people in public spaces, especially on the role of white women in contributing to the view that Black men are threatening figures.  

For Crystal M. Fleming, associate professor of sociology and Africana Studies at SUNY Stony Brook, his essay is especially relevant right now. 

"We see the relevance of his critique in the recent incident in New York City, wherein a white woman named Amy Cooper infamously called the police and lied, claiming that a Black man — Christian Cooper — threatened her life in Central Park. Although the experience that Staples describes took place decades ago, the social dynamics have largely remained the same," Fleming told Insider. 

"I Was Pregnant and in Crisis. All the Doctors and Nurses Saw Was an Incompetent Black Woman" by Tressie McMillan Cottom

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an author, associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty affiliate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. In this essay, Cottom shares her gut-wrenching experience of racism within the healthcare system. 

Fleming called this piece an "excellent primer on intersectionality" between racism and sexism, calling Cottom one of the most influential sociologists and writers in the US today.  Read it here>>

"A Report from Occupied Territory" by James Baldwin

Baldwin's "A Report from Occupied Territory" was originally published in The Nation in 1966. It takes a hard look at violence against Black people in the US, specifically police brutality. 

"Baldwin's work remains essential to understanding the depth and breadth of anti-black racism in our society. This essay — which touches on issues of racialized violence, policing and the role of the law in reproducing inequality — is an absolute must-read for anyone who wants to understand just how much has not changed with regard to police violence and anti-Black racism in our country," Fleming told Insider.  Read it here>>

"I'm From Philly. 30 Years Later, I'm Still Trying To Make Sense Of The MOVE Bombing" by Gene Demby

On May 13, 1985, a police helicopter dropped a bomb on the MOVE compound in Philadelphia, which housed members of the MOVE, a black liberation group founded in 1972 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eleven people, including five children, died in the airstrike. In this essay, Gene Demby, co-host and correspondent for NPR's Code Switch team, tries to wrap his head around the shocking instance of police violence against Black people. 

"I would argue that the fact that police were authorized to literally bomb Black citizens in their own homes, in their own country, is directly relevant to current conversations about militarized police and the growing movement to defund and abolish policing," Fleming said.  Read it here>>

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Christian Peña Christian Peña

• Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/how-social-media-is-helping-students-of-color-speak-out-about-racism-on-campus

How social media is helping students of color speak out about racism on campus

Students of color are speaking up about the racial prejudice and scrutiny they encounter in higher education, as part of a national reckoning on racial injustice ignited by the killings of Black Americans like George Floyd by law enforcement and the wave of protests — often led by young people — that followed.

On social media, students are sharing their experiences at predominantly white institutions (PWIs), calling for the end of the implicit and explicit racial biases they face, and demanding accountability from administrators. To some, accountability means sparking discussions about race and the inequalities present in college. For others, it means that students who act in racist ways would face consequences such as suspension, having their Greek organization closed, or even expulsion from the institution.

Thousands of students from colleges and universities with majority white populations have used anonymous Instagram accounts to share their experiences dealing with racism on their respective campuses. Accounts like @dearpwi feature screenshots and videos of students at universities using racial slurs, or engaging in acts of cultural appropriation , such as white college athletes posing as “Mexican” bandits by wearing a sombrero or dressing as a tequila bottle, or posing as “African” men wearing dashikis.

“My family immigrated to the U.S. from an African country […] the professor made jokes to me about how I must be so skinny because in my parent’s country there’s ‘not enough food,’” a student from Haverford College posted on the account .

A student studying at Columbia University posted about often being the only Native American wherever they go. “I’ve always known that in any space I enter, I am oftentimes the first Native American people meet,” the student wrote. “I remember one night eating dinner with a group of friends when one of them said ‘I thought all of your people were dead until I met you.’”

That account alone has more than 190 posts and has amassed 31,000 followers, detailing incidents at nearly 70 universities, including all of the schools in the Ivy League. The @dearpwi account and others, such as various accounts that start with the words “Black at,” are not officially affiliated with any university, and are meant to offer a safe place for those who are dealing with racism in their institutions.

On Twitter, students and professors are using the hashtag #BlackIntheIvory , where they share their successes and their hardships. Users who have embraced the hashtag have shared everything from professional advice, to their thoughts on Black hair and how it often becomes a target of racism.

When students of color face inhospitable or racist environments, they say it makes it more difficult to be themselves. Not only do they have to worry about assignments and grades, but how they’re going to be treated, what resources they will have to be successful and if they’ll be able to fit in.

Thriving academically is challenging without the proper support, which can mean having a faculty that looks like them, or being taught a curriculum that addresses the issues that people of color face daily, students have also said on social media.

According to the National Center for Educational Statistics , some people of color are vastly underrepresented among professors at American institutions: Black males, Black females, Hispanic males and Hispanic females each accounted for 3 percent of the total. Upon moving to college, Mia Hamernik, a senior at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, never thought she’d live in a community where everyone else looked different than her. For the California native, who was born to Argentine immigrants, the institution she now calls home is less than 10 percent Latino . Hamernik said her ethnicity and cultural background often leads other students to question her about the color of her skin.

“A student told me it was ‘cool’ that some of my family members were assassinated during the ‘Guerra Sucia,’” said Hamernik. Shocked that a period of state-sponsored violence carried out by the military government would be regarded as “cool,” Hamernik couldn’t help but feel voiceless and unheard among her peers.

“The biggest change I personally experienced was becoming aware of my own identity in the face of countless students who would either ignore my identity or highlight my otherness,” she said.

Maynor Loaisiga, a third-year student, enrolled at Bowdoin College in Maine with the hopes of receiving a rigorous education and full academic support. But he quickly realized the faculty at his university were not representative of the diverse student body. Loaisiga, who was born and raised in Managua, Nicaragua, and migrated to the United States at the age of 11, has been speaking out about issues of social and racial justice since his freshman year and is one of the many students across the United States who are using their voices on social media to bring attention to the pains and hurdles they encounter in college.

In early July, Loasiga submitted a post to the Instagram account @dearbowdoin , calling out his institution. “It is shameful that Bowdoin’s largest academic department only has two professors POC’s,” he wrote. “Do better.”

Of the 249 faculty members at Bowdoin College , 17.9 percent are people of color, while students of color make up a third of Bowdown’s student population. According to a 2019 analysis from Pew Research Center, out of all faculty members in the U.S., including adjuncts, 24 percent are non-white . A statement on Bowdoin’s Office of Inclusion and Diversity website says, “Bowdoin is engaged in the deliberate and focused work of identifying where structural racism is embedded in our policies, practices, and everyday operations. We will develop specific plans to address barriers to equity wherever they are found.”

In order to curb feelings of isolation for students of color, inclusivity and diversity must be implemented into college culture and curriculums, said Carole Emberton, author of “ Beyond Redemption: Race Violence, and the American South After the Civil War .” Emberton, who teaches the Civil War and the history of race at the University of Buffalo, argues that tough conversations must take place in the classroom even when faculty members are not prepared to face the challenge.

“We have to work on our pedagogical training and our own outlooks to make sure we’re well equipped to handle these kinds of difficult conversations,” Emberton said. “Students are hungry for the tools to understand and to speak about the world we live in.”

The language of diversity and inclusion has also been amplified on social media and in the news media, fostering more conversations about the insidiousness of systemic racism. While fluency in those concepts may not be a cure-all for racism at universities, for some, it is a step closer to dismantling a culture of oppression.

Ralph Tamakloe, a Black student at the University of Pennsylvania studying electrical engineering, said he has faced microaggressions such as being followed around campus by students, to being asked to show his campus ID by campus police, to having his personal belongings searched in a chemistry lab.

While Tamakloe said he tries to forget about these incidents, he can’t help but reflect and think about how different certain scenarios are for students who do not look like him. In his experience, white people do not face the same stereotypes he does and do not have to worry about being followed around campus because they’re suspected of wrongdoing.

He said he felt that school administrators are dismissive of such incidents. In July, he said, the National Society of Black Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania had a meeting with the School of Engineering’s dean, where they addressed microaggressions that are displayed toward Black students at the institution. According to Tamakloe, the dean listened but didn’t promise any fundamental change. He said he felt like he was being gaslighted.

Vijay Kumar, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), said he believes the best way to create an inclusive environment is to change campus behavior rather than punishing individuals who exhibit hurtful behavior, as well as admitting students of color at the same rate as white students.

“The least we can do is to guarantee a level playing field where there’s a rich interaction between students from different” backgrounds, he said about college acceptance rates generally. “We’re not able to do this at this point.”

Kumar said he plans to kick-start a diversity and inclusion campaign this September in which he will individually contact every faculty and staff member to discuss their concerns and possible ideas on how to create an environment that is welcoming for all. The campaign will have mandatory training on anti-racism and unconscious bias for all faculty, staff and students within the engineering school, he added. Every day when Camille Zubrinsky Charles looks at her personal Instagram account, she reads the anonymous stories students of color posted on @blackivystories . Charles, a professor of sociology, Africana studies and education at UPenn, can feel the pain that some anonymous students express, because she once had similar experiences.

“It breaks my heart that they’re having to go through it, because I can still feel what that feels like,” said Charles, co-author of “ Taming the River: Negotiating the Academic, Financial, and Social Currents in Selective Colleges and Universities .” Charles said she believes as an educator into not avoiding discomfort when it comes to teaching race because it reminds students of why they are in college — to become critical thinkers and to be open to alternative points of view. But faculty members have a responsibility to figure out how to navigate appropriate conversations that create a safe environment for marginalized students who have their college experiences minimized, Charles said: “Students have to be reminded that they’re of equal status by the grown-up in the room.”

For now, Tamakloe feels that social media is the only way to hold people and universities accountable.

“Without these [social media] accounts, I think we would have this mentality that schools are just right when they are not,” Tamakloe said.

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Racism - List of Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

It is difficult to imagine a more painful topic than racism. Violation of civil rights based on race, racial injustice, and discrimination against African American people are just a small part of issues related to racial inequality in the United States. Such a topical issue was also displayed in the context of school and college education, as students are often asked to write informative and research essays about racial discrimination.

The work on this paper is highly challenging as a student is supposed to study various cruel examples of bad attitudes and consider social questions. One should develop a topic sentence alongside the titles, outline, conclusion for essay on racism. The easiest way is to consult racism essay topics and ideas on our web. Also, we provide an example of a free college essay on racism in America for you to get acquainted with the problem.

Moreover, a hint to writing an excellent essay is good hooks considering the problem. You can find ideas for the thesis statement about racism that may help broaden your comprehension of the theme. It’s crucial to study persuasive and argumentative essay examples about racism in society, as it may help you to compose your paper.

Racism is closer than we think. Unfortunately, this awful social disease is also common for all levels and systems in the US. A student can develop a research paper about systemic racism with the help of the prompts we provide in this section.

Racism in Pop Culture

Emma Watson, Tom Hanks, both names are familiar and quite popular in Hollywood and on television. An emerging actor John Boyega whose name may not be widely known nevertheless impressed the audience with his character Finn from Star Wars. But as popular as these movie actors are, the movie that they all starred in The Circle did not sit well with the audience. In addition to the movie's low rating on film review sites and its abrupt ending that left […]

Appeal to Ethos, Logos and Pathos Racism

Abraham Lincoln once said, Achievement has no color."", but is that really true? In many cases of racism, people have been suppressed and kept from being able to contribute to the society. Racism is a blight and a hindrance to our development. Imagine the many things we could do if people could set aside differences and cooperate meaningfully. Sadly that is not the case. In reality, people are put down because of their heritage and genetics. By no means is […]

Professions for Women by Virginia Woolf

Have you ever asked yourself why people assume something of others by looks? In the chapter, Professions for Women written in 1931 by Virginia Woolf, who talks about her life and the difference she tried to make for all women in that period. She wanted her audience who were professional women to be able to figure out on their own what her story was about. Woolf talks about how she was unmasked and confused as she makes her readers understand […]

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Racism in Movie “42”

The movie I chose for this assignment is 42 starring Chadwick Boseman and Harrison Ford. The movie is about Jackie Robinson, a baseball player who broke the color barrier when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. One of the topics we covered in this course was racism. For my generation it is hard to understand how pervasive racism used to be in society. I have three cousins that have a black father. Many of my friends are from different races and […]

Racism and the U.S. Criminal Justice System

Introduction The primary purpose of this report is to explore racism issues in the United States justice system and addressing the solutions to the problem affecting the judicial society. Racism entails social practices that give merits explicitly solely to members of certain racial groups. Racism is attributed to three main aspects such as; personal predisposition, ideologies, and cultural racism, which promotes policies and practices that deepen racial discrimination. Institutional racism is also rife in the US justice system. This entails […]

About Black Lives Matter Movement

The fundamental rights and freedoms enshrined in the Constitution are inherent for all. There is no question that all people (blacks, Latinos, Indians, or white) were created free and equal with certain inalienable rights. This is a universally accepted principle. Segregation and racism against minorities in this country have been widely discussed, and prominent figures have taken a stand asking people to join in the fight for equality. This stand addresses the significance of black lives. However, contrasting opinions on […]

Structural Racism in U.S. Medical Care System Doctor-Patient Relationship

US history is littered with instances of racism and it has creeped into not only social, political, and economic structures of society, but also the US healthcare system. Racism is the belief that one race is superior over others, which leads to discrimination and prejudice against people based on their race or ethnicity (Romano). Centuries of racism in the United States' social structures has led to institutionalized or systemic racism”policies and behaviors adapted into our social, economic, and political systems […]

Slavery and Racism in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is absolutely relating a message to readers about the ills of slavery but this is a complex matter. On the one hand, the only truly good and reliable character is Jim who, a slave, is subhuman. Also, twain wrote this book after slavery had been abolished, therefore, the fact that is significant. There are still several traces of some degree of racism in the novel, including the use of the n word and his tendency […]

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest James Gaines

The author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Ernest J. Gaines, is a male African American author who has taken full advantage of his culture by writing about rural Louisiana. His stories mainly tell the struggles of blacks trying to make a living in racist and discriminating lands. Many of his stories are based on his own family experiences. In Ernest J. Gaines’ novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, four themes that are displayed are the nature of […]

History of Racism

Racism started in the 1700s and has still been occuring till this day. From the looks of it, it seems to be that racism would never end. Because of cultural reasons, stereotypes, and economic reasons, it will always be an issue. People teach their kids to be racist, and make racists comments like it's normal. We can't stop people from having their personal opinions on racism, but we can stay aware of how racists others could be, our history of […]

A Simple Introduction to Three Main Types of Racism

Race plays an important role in both personal and social life, and racial issues are some of the most heated debates in the world due to their complexity, involving the diverse historical and cultural backgrounds of different ethnic groups. Consciously or unconsciously, when one race holds prejudice, discrimination, and a sense of superiority to oppress another race, the issue of racism arises. Based on aspects of individual biases, social institutions, and cultural backgrounds, the three most common types of racism […]

Civil Rights Martyrs

Are you willing to give your life for your people? These martyrs of the civil rights movement gave everything for their people. Although some may say their deaths did not have an impact on the civil rights movements. They risked their lives just so African Americans could have the rights they have today. The definition of martyr is a person who is killed because of their religious or other beliefs. They believe that everyone should be equal and have the […]

Making Racism Obsolete

Does racism still exist? Some would say no?, but some would agree that racism is a cut that won't heal. Molefi Kete Asante is a professor at Temple University and has written many books during his career. In this analysis I will dissect Asante's work covering racism from the past, present and the future moving forward. Asante argues that America is divided between two divisions, the Promise and the Wilderness. Historically, African Americans has been at a disadvantage politically, socially, […]

American Rule in the Philippines and Racism

During our almost 50 years of control in the Philippines, many of our law makers and leaders were fueled by debates at home, and also our presence overseas. These two perspectives gave a lot of controversy as to how Americans were taking control, and confusion of what they were actually doing in the Philippines. Many leaders drew from Anglo- Saxon beliefs, which lead to racist ideas and laws. These combined proved unfair treatment of the Filipinos and large amounts of […]

Social Media’s Role in Perceptions of Racism in the USA

Research studies show that racism has been in existence for centuries. Whether this is still an issue, is the question we must ask ourselves. The internet or, social media has become a major part of society over the years and conveys information, news, opinionated posts, and propaganda, as well. There are several factors involved within this topic and a plethora of resources available in search of the answers. We will look at different opinions, research studies, and ideas in relation […]

The Institutional Racism

In today society there is several police brutality against black people, and it is governed by the behavioral norms which defined the social and political institution that support institutional systems. Black people still experience racism from people who think they are superior, it is a major problem in our society which emerged from history till date and it has influences other people mindset towards each other to live their dreams. In the educational system, staffs face several challenges among black […]

Movie Review of Argo with Regards to Geography

The movie "Crash" is set in a geographical setting which clearly helps in building the major themes of racial discrimination and drug trafficking. This is because the movie is set in Los Angeles which is an area of racial discrimination epitome and partially in Mexico, a geographical area well known for drug trafficking (Schneider, 2014). The physical geographical setting where the movie is shot is very crucial as it helps in developing the main themes of the movie. The movie […]

The Development of Cultural Racism Associated with American Politics

Abstract Politics in the United States have always been a heated issue, and never more so than now. The surprising election of Donald Trump has created a clear cultural divide on many levels that continues to cultivate hate, and gifts not just Americans but the entire world with cultural racism that we have not seen for a long time. The political divide in America affects every American, every day, so much so that you would be hard-pressed to find someone […]

Racism and Civil War

One person is all it takes to change the world, for the good or for the bad. In this democratic society, every person is granted the same three unalienable rights: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If the Declaration of Independence stands true, then what’s the difference between a white individual and a black individual? The word “racism” is associated with the idea of one race being superior to the other, most commonly, blacks are “inferior” to whites. No […]

What is Racism?

Racism is prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior and the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or […]

There Will Always be Color Racism is not Dead

Racism is not dead. Equality does not exist. The color of a person's skin still matters. Even in the 21st century, there are flaws within our legal system that has allowed Jim Crow to still exist under a new skin. The United States has used mass incarceration to continually disenfranchise millions of the African American Community. In The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander reasons that the criminal justice system is faulty and with […]

Discrimination of Races

Discrimination of races is something that is occuring in our society everyday. It still exists today because it started so long ago and once certain races had the hierarchy, some refuse to let go of the idea that they have more power just because they look a certain way and they choose to discriminate the minorities. Discrimination against a person's race occurs when an individual or group of individuals are treated unequally because of their true or perceived race. I […]

Racism and Discrimination: the Influence of Past Sins

Discrimination against black people by white people in the United States had been regarded as a matter of course and justifiable for more than 300 years. Therefore, the problem is far more than whether the laws are prohibited or not, but whether people's mind and concepts are changed or not. The latter is something that everyone understands but is the most difficult to do. While looking at American history, the history of African Americans can be said to be soaked […]

Racism: Unmasking Microaggressions and Discrimination

Reading through the article provided a vivid reflection on how racism becomes a serious issue in the today society. There are various types of racism the article brings out manifested in micro aggression form. The varied opinions in my mind provide a clear picture of the information relayed in the article through the following analysis. Discrimination concerning race will major in my analysis. First, let me talk about the black guy abused in the Saudi Arabia that has sparked public […]

Color Blind Racism

I enjoyed watching this documentary “White Like Me”, by Tim Wise. What I found most surprising was the fact that Tim Wise was a white male and was the individual in the film talking about the discrimination people of color receive. There were a few other things that surprised me, like the fact that there are more African Americans in jail and on probation than the number of those enslaved in 1850. The movie version of Black Like Me was […]

The Acts of Imperialism and Racism in “The Heart of Darkness”

In the novel The Heart of Darkness, the reader is introduced to the acts of imperialism and racism. The story tells of Europeans who have established a colony in Africa that is being used for trade purposes. However, the background of the story is that the Europeans are trying to colonize the Africans and introduce them to the European way of living. The white traders are not only trying to change the Africans way of life, the whites also view […]

Stereotyping and Discrimination

Introduction The movie starts with all the animals living together and happily in the big city. Their peaceful lives are then disturbed by ferocious predators. The case goes to the swindler fox and a bunny cop, those who unintentionally solve many problems related to hidden cases of interspecies.Rhetorical Strategies Few of the negative observers interpret that movie does not openly or directly express the racism. Additionally, the writer named as Nico Lang also asserts that movie does not score much […]

Police Brutality and Racism

The Declaration of Independence was created to protect the inalienable rights that all Americans receive at birth, yet police brutality continues to threaten the rights of African Americans everywhere. Police everywhere need to be given mandatory psychological tests in order to gain awareness of racial bias in law enforcement and allow citizens to slowly gain trust for the officers in law enforcement. No one wants a child to grow up in a world filled with hate. As Martin Luther King […]

Effects of Racism in Desiree’s Baby

As hard as it may be to talk about it, race has found a humble abode in literature. Desiree’s baby revolves around race and how it affects its main characters. A woman by the name of Desiree gives birth to a baby boy who is fathered by cruel slave master Armand Aubigny. Desiree makes a startling discovery when she finds out that her baby is of African heritage and this infuriates her husband who kicks them out causing Desiree to […]

Racism and Slavery

During the colonial period, Americans came up with the idea to bring African men and women overseas and use them as slaves. The effects of slavery on African Americans were enormous, and the white men got higher ranked in the hierarchy than the back men because of the colour of their skin. In order to discuss the impact that slavery has had on today’s society, you need to first address why it actually occurred. During the 17th and 18th century, […]

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How To Write An Essay On Racism

Introduction to the complexities of racism.

Writing an essay on racism involves delving into a complex and sensitive subject that has deep historical roots and contemporary implications. Begin your essay by defining racism as a system of discrimination based on race, affecting individuals and groups socially, economically, and politically. Highlight the importance of understanding racism not only as overt acts of discrimination but also as institutional and systemic practices. This introduction should lay the groundwork for your exploration, whether it's focused on historical aspects of racism, its manifestations in modern society, or strategies for combating racial prejudice and inequality.

Historical Context and Evolution of Racism

The body of your essay should include a detailed examination of the historical context and evolution of racism. Discuss how racism has been perpetuated and institutionalized over time, highlighting key historical events and policies that have contributed to racial discrimination and segregation. Depending on your essay’s focus, you might explore the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, Jim Crow laws, or apartheid, among other topics. This historical perspective is crucial for understanding how past injustices continue to shape present racial dynamics and attitudes.

Analyzing Modern Manifestations of Racism

Transition to discussing the modern manifestations of racism. Examine how racism operates in current societal structures, such as in the criminal justice system, education, employment, and healthcare. Discuss the concept of systemic racism and how it perpetuates inequality, as well as the impact of racial bias and stereotypes in media representation and everyday interactions. This section should also address the intersectionality of racism, acknowledging how race intersects with other identities like gender, class, and sexuality, contributing to unique experiences of discrimination.

Strategies for Addressing and Combating Racism

Conclude your essay by exploring strategies for addressing and combating racism. Discuss the importance of education, awareness-raising, and open dialogue in challenging racist beliefs and stereotypes. Reflect on the role of policy changes, affirmative action, and reparations in addressing systemic racism. Emphasize the importance of individual and collective action in fostering a more inclusive and equitable society. Your conclusion should not only summarize the key points of your essay but also inspire a sense of hope and commitment to anti-racist efforts, underscoring the ongoing work needed to dismantle racism in all its forms.

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Eight actions to reduce racism in college classrooms.

Last year, at dozens of colleges and universities across the United States, students protested institutional unresponsiveness to pervasive issues of racial inequity. Most media attention disproportionately focused on the popularity of the protests as opposed to the actual issues underlying campus unrest. For example, instead of deeply exploring the experiences that ignited demonstrations among students at the University of Missouri, journalists wrote mostly about the football team’s threat to cancel its game against Brigham Young University, the potential financial implications of the team’s activism, and the eventual resignations of the system president and the chancellor of the university’s flagship campus. Similarly, news coverage of protests at Yale University concentrated less on students’ frustrations with the university’s climate of racial exclusion and more on e-mails about potentially offensive Halloween costumes and perceived threats to free speech.

It is important for faculty members to understand that students were protesting racism. It is also essential that professors recognize how they, often unknowingly and inadvertently, say and do racist things to students of color in the classroom. Student uprisings were as much a response to negative experiences with their peers and administrators as they were expressions of frustration with the cultural incompetence of their teachers. Students of color did not suddenly start experiencing racist stereotyping and racially derogatory comments, disregard for the thoughtful integration of their cultural histories in the curriculum, and threats to their sense of belonging in college classrooms during the 2015–16 academic year. We know from our work as scholars at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education that these problems are long-standing.

College presidents, provosts, deans, and other institutional leaders hire researchers from the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education to spend three to four days on their campuses doing racial climate assessments. At some places we are asked to focus on racial and ethnic differences among faculty and staff members in their feelings of inclusion, respectability, and opportunities for fair and equitable professional advancement, as well as on racial tensions in workplace settings. But on most campuses, administrators ask us to assess the racial climate for students—feelings of inclusion and belonging across racial and ethnic groups, the extent to which students interact substantively across difference, where and what students learn about race, appraisals of institutional commitments to fostering inclusive environments, and characterizations of the supportiveness of classrooms and other spaces. We have done these studies at more than thirty campuses across geographic regions and institutional types, ranging from Portland Community College to Princeton University.

Presented in this article are eight actions faculty members must take to respond more effectively to racism in college classrooms. Findings from our center’s student-focused climate studies inform these recommendations. To be sure, eight simple acts will not completely eradicate or even sufficiently address the classroom-related experiences that students of color consistently describe in our focus-group interviews. Nonetheless, participants in our studies say it would greatly improve their experiences if their professors did the following eight things.

1. Recognize your implicit biases and remediate your racial illiteracy.

Students we interview almost always tell us the majority of their instructors (sometimes including faculty members of color) are insufficiently skilled to teach learners from a range of racial groups and cultural backgrounds. As explained in Shaun R. Harper’s forthcoming book, Race Matters in College , faculty members are byproducts of their own educational upbringings. Too few of us were ever afforded opportunities to discuss or meaningfully learn about race in our K–12 schools, undergraduate studies, or doctoral programs. Consequently, there were not enough opportunities to examine and correct the ways we have been socialized to think about the racial “other” or to develop the skills we would ultimately need to teach contemporary college students. Furthermore, too many of us entered the professoriate having taken, at most, only one formal course on college teaching in our graduate programs—and in most instances, that course did not focus nearly enough on race, raise our consciousness about our implicit biases, expose us to authors of color and texts from different cultural points of view, or equip us with the range of skills needed to manage racial conflicts that occasionally occur in classrooms.

Recognizing one’s implicit biases is a crucial first step; the seven other actions we recommend rest heavily on this one. Project Implicit at Harvard University offers free online tests that help reveal how we have been socialized to view people from racial backgrounds that are different from our own (see https://implicit.harvard.edu ). Results from these tests could be useful to faculty members, as they might reveal deeply held assumptions that play out in embarrassing, destructive, and sometimes hurtful ways in college classrooms. In addition to simply identifying biases, professors must also work in purposeful ways to acquire racial literacy and learn new teaching methods. Ten great books that can help faculty members do this are listed at the end of this article. We recommend reading race-focused publications and discussing them in groups. Faculty members in a department would benefit from talking with one another about ways to deliberately integrate into their teaching practices many of the recommendations that experts have published.

Attending sessions at conferences outside of one’s discipline that are focused on student success and teaching diverse learners (for example, NCORE—the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education) will expose faculty members to content and strategies they will have encountered nowhere else along their professional journeys. Our center offers Penn Equity Institutes, five-week virtual education experiences for twenty faculty members within a department or school or across a campus. Institute participants learn how to talk more comfortably and honestly about race with their colleagues, foster racially inclusive classroom environments, and employ a range of other skills that student participants in our climate studies tell us they wish their professors had (see http://www.penninstitutes.org ).

2. Don’t be surprised when a black male student writes well.

Media we have consumed throughout our lifetimes inescapably shape ideas and expectations about particular racial groups that we bring to classrooms. For instance, young black men are commonly portrayed as rappers, athletes, and criminals—rarely as scholars. Given this, black men and other students of color in our studies tell us their white professors are too often visibly surprised when they make thoughtful statements in class. Instructors also accuse them of cheating when their papers are well written and they perform exceptionally well on exams. In our conversations with them, a surprising number of faculty colleagues have justified these actions by saying, “Students from these backgrounds typically don’t do well in my courses.” That does not mean every student from that racial or ethnic group is incapable of success; to assume so is racist.

3. Stop expecting the Latina student to speak for all Latinos.

When urban ghettos, poverty, or just about any issue pertaining to people of color arises in classroom discussions, professors and peers expect the person of color to be the spokesperson. Expertise is presumed, which often results in students of color being forced to teach their professors and peers about race. Having to represent an entire diaspora of people (an expectation also placed on Asian Americans and blacks) is daunting for Latino students. Also troubling to them is the assumption that every person from a particular racial or ethnic group grew up in the inner city or in poverty.

4. Quit thinking all Asian American students are the same.

Illinois State University professor Nicholas Daniel Hartlep writes masterfully about the “model minority myth”: the presumption that all Asian Americans are math and science geniuses who do not require any academic support or resources. Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) participants in our climate studies consistently tell us their professors and others do not acknowledge the racism they experience because AAPIs are usually at the top of enrollment, performance, and attainment metrics, at times ahead of white students. These statistics, however, say nothing about their experiences. They also mask troubling educational outcomes among Cambodian, Hmong, Laotian, Samoan, and other AAPI groups. Institutional actors routinely fail to disaggregate data and distinguish ethnic, class, language, and cultural differences among AAPI students. Also, lower-income AAPI students tell us they are usually not selected to work in professors’ labs or collaborate with faculty members on research projects; we hear the same stories from many of their Native American, black, and Latino peers.

5. Be aware that stereotype threat may be occurring among some students of color.

Renowned psychologist Claude Steele introduced the term stereotype threat : the anxiety and resultant behavioral response that ensues when a student of a socially stigmatized group encounters stereotypes that those outside the group hold about them. Steele’s research shows how stereotype threat can negatively affect academic performance. The lone Native American student who wishes to contribute to class discussions may be rehearsing over and over in her head what she is going to say because she recognizes that her white professor and peers are likely to attribute her statement to all Native Americans. Moreover, she is aware that many whites do not usually view her people as intelligent and think she was admitted to the university only because of affirmative action. Hence, whatever she says has to be eloquent, perhaps perfect; this pressure distracts her. Meanwhile, her white classmates are saying whatever they want and benefiting more fully from their engagement in class discussions.

6. Meaningfully integrate diverse cultures and peoples into the curriculum.

Put plainly, students of color are tired of reading one-dimensional literatures that exclude their cultural histories and fail to acknowledge their humanity. They want authors and texts from diverse perspectives to appear on syllabi and be substantively engaged in class. Many instructors are familiar only with the racially exclusive scholarship to which they were introduced in their doctoral studies and the mostly white scholars their fields privilege and celebrate as experts. Hence, they tend to teach those texts and authors. There are expert professors of color in just about every academic field. There also are white scholars who conduct research and publish routinely on people of color. Faculty members should assign publications these professors have written and invite their recommendations of other works that might be included. One way to do this is through an external review of syllabi from courses offered in a department. The department chair could send packets of syllabi to experts in the same field at other institutions and ask colleagues to assess the inclusion of diverse perspectives and offer recommendations for improvement.

7. Responsibly address racial tensions when they arise.

Participants in our studies say they are disappointed when moments of racial tension occur in classrooms and the instructor frantically responds by immediately shutting down conversations. Many students actually see these moments as potentially powerful learning opportunities, specifically for the offending student. But in most instances, students of color are left alone to grapple with their classmate’s racially offensive statement or action. They wish their professors knew how to make better educational use of these moments. They also want faculty members, at minimum, to hold white students accountable for saying outrageously offensive things. Censorship and disciplinary action are not what they tell us they desire. Instead, they want white classmates at least to be challenged to think critically about how their statements affect others. Several NCORE sessions focus on practically addressing racial tension in productive ways, as do modules in our Penn Equity Institutes.

8. Recognize that you and your faculty colleagues share much responsibility for racial inequities.

Analysts usually attribute racial inequities in persistence and performance to students’ insufficient preparation for college-level academic work, to disengagement and a lack of student effort, and, sometimes, to the erroneous assumption that white people are genetically smarter. Students of color repeatedly tell us in climate studies that a more expansive set of factors and conditions lead to their underachievement: racist encounters in classrooms, culturally exclusive curricula, low faculty expectations, and comparatively fewer opportunities for substantive engagement with white professors outside of class, just to name a few. University of Southern California professor Estela Mara Bensimon and her colleagues in the Center for Urban Education developed the Equity Scorecard, a dynamic collaborative inquiry and institutional change process that helps faculty members and administrators discover how their practices help sustain racial inequities in student outcomes (see http://cue.usc.edu/tools ). Participants in our studies want their instructors to assume greater responsibility for achieving racial equity goals; the Equity Scorecard could be enormously useful in this regard.

Exclusionary classroom experiences and racist encounters involving faculty members are among the many racial problems college students have been protesting. On several campuses they were asking institutional leaders to invest more resources in cultural centers and multicultural affairs offices, hire more professors of color, and retain and elevate the status of ethnic studies programs. But they were also asking their instructors to be less racist and to become more highly skilled at teaching diverse learners—the same things they say when we ask in interviews what they expect from their institutions. Lists of demands from last year’s protests confirm that students of color are calling for greater representation in the curriculum, as well as more culturally conscious and racially literate teachers (see https://blackalliance.org/student-demands/ ). In addition to the actions recommended above, developing racial literacy from publications and attending conferences are critically important to creating safer, more inclusive classroom environments for diverse learners. Without substantive investments from college faculty, racial climates will surely worsen and institutions of higher education will continually fall short of making good on diversity-related promises conveyed to students through mission statements, in presidential speeches and admissions materials, on websites, and elsewhere.  

Recommended Books

Bensimon, Estela Mara, and Lindsey Malcom. Confronting Equity Issues on Campus: Implementing the Equity Scorecard in Theory and Practice . Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2012.

Dowd, Alicia C., and Estela Mara Bensimon. Engaging the Race Question: Accountability and Equity in U.S. Higher Education . New York: Teachers College Press, 2015.

Harper, Shaun R. Race Matters in College . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming.

Hartlep, Nicholas D. The Model Minority Stereotype: Demystifying Asian American Success . Charlotte, NC: Information Age, 2013.

Museus, Samuel D., and Uma M. Jayakumar. Creating Campus Cultures: Fostering Success among Racially Diverse Student Populations . New York: Routledge, 2012.

Quaye, Stephen John, and Shaun R. Harper. Student Engagement in Higher Education: Theoretical Perspectives and Practical Approaches for Diverse Populations . 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Smith, Daryl G. Diversity’s Promise for Higher Education: Making It Work . 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Steele, Claude M. Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do . New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Sue, Derald Wing. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010.

Sue, Derald Wing. Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race . Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015.

Shaun R. Harper is a professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, and president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education. His e-mail address is [email protected] . Charles H. F. Davis III teaches in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also director of higher education research and initiatives in the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education. His e-mail address is [email protected] . 

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Together and Alone? The Challenge of Talking about Racism on Campus

Higher education institutions are among the few places where people of different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds can engage with each other in more than just a superficial way, providing students a unique opportunity to develop the skills needed to function effectively in a diverse, increasingly global world. Whether students develop this capacity will depend in large part on whether the institution they attend has provided structures for those critical learning experiences to take place. But what form should such learning experiences take? This essay argues that positive cross-racial engagement may require both structured intergroup dialogue and intragroup dialogue opportunities to support the learning needs of both White students and students of color in the context of predominantly White institutions.

Beverly Daniel Tatum is President Emerita of Spelman College. She is the former Acting President of Mount Holyoke College, where she also served as Professor of Psychology and Education and later as Chair of the Department and Dean of the College. She is the author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race (rev. ed., 2017), Can We Talk about Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation (2007), and Assimilation Blues: Black Families in a White Community (1987).

In 1954, the year of the landmark Supreme Court case on school segregation Brown v. Board of Education , the U.S. population was 90 percent White. 1 Today, the majority of elementary and secondary school children are children of color: Black, Latinx, Asian, or American Indian. 2 Yet despite the changing demographics of the nation, most children in the United States attend elementary and secondary schools that do not reflect that diversity. Old patterns of segregation persist, most notably in schools and neighborhoods. More than sixty years after Brown , our public schools are more segregated today than they were in 1980. 3 Nationwide, nearly 75 percent of Black students today attend so-called majority-minority schools, and 38 percent attend schools with student bodies that are 10 percent or less White. Similarly, approximately 80 percent of Latinx youth attend schools where students of color are in the majority, and more than 40 percent attend schools where the White population is less than 10 percent of the student body. Both Black and Latinx students are much more likely than White students to attend a school where 60 percent or more of their classmates are living in poverty. 4 Neighborhoods once again determine public school assignment, and to the extent that neighborhoods are segregated, the schools remain so.

Given this pattern of segregation, it is perhaps no surprise that, according to a 2013 American Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute ( PRRI ), 75 percent of Whites have entirely White social networks, without any minority presence. This degree of social network racial isolation is significantly higher than among Black Americans (65 percent) or Hispanic Americans (46 percent). Robert P. Jones, the CEO of PRRI , has pointed out that “the chief obstacle to having an intelligent, or even intelligible, conversation across the racial divide is that on average White Americans . . . talk mostly to other White people.” The result is that most Whites are not “socially positioned” to understand the experiences of people of color. 5 The now centuries-long persistence of residential and school segregation in the United States goes a long way toward explaining such social network homogeneity.

And what difference does it make? In his 1968 book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King observes that the social change needed for a healthy multiracial society would not occur without meaningful cross-group contact. “A vigorous enforcement of civil rights will bring an end to segregated public facilities, but it cannot bring an end to fears, prejudice, pride and irrationality, which are the barriers to a truly integrated society.” King continues, “Racial understanding is not something that we find but something that we must create . . . . The ability of [racial groups] to work together, to understand each other will not be found ready-made; it must be created by the fact of contact.” Empathic contact must be created. It is not enough to be in the same neighborhood, or even in the same room. It is necessary to create contact that allows for genuine empathy across lines of difference if we are to reduce the barriers that King describes.

Higher education offers us the possibility of creating such empathic contact. More young people than ever are making the choice to pursue higher education. The increasing diversity of our nation can be seen in higher ed institutions of all kinds. The incoming class of 2022 is more diverse than ever, reflecting the changing demographics of the nation. Even a highly selective institution like Harvard University reported in the fall of 2017 that the entering class was the most diverse in its history, with students of color for the first time making up more than 50 percent of the cohort. 6 Colleges and universities are among the few places where people of different racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds can engage with each other in more than just a superficial way. For many students, regardless of racial background, the college environment is likely the most diverse learning environment they have experienced in their lives. In that context, students have a unique opportunity to engage with people whose life experiences and viewpoints are different than their own and to develop the leadership capacity needed to function effectively in a diverse, increasingly global world. Learning to engage with others whose viewpoints are different from one’s own is a citizenship skill fundamental to maintaining a healthy democracy.

Whether college students develop this citizenship skill, however, will depend in large part on whether the institution they attend has provided structure for those critical learning experiences to take place. It is natural for students of all backgrounds to gravitate to the comfort of the familiar, seeking out those places where they experience a deep sense of belonging. Sometimes that sense of belonging comes from spending time with same-experience peers (such as those who may be of the same racial background, or share the same religious beliefs, or speak the same home-language), and there is nothing wrong with that. But the development of these citizenship skills requires stepping out of one’s comfort zone and engaging with difference. Without encouragement, students often avoid doing so.

For example, in the fall of 2016, I visited Franklin and Marshall College, a small liberal arts college in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that is increasingly known for its commitment to expanding access for student talent from all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds. The president had invited me to join him in a conversation about the importance of dialogue as the kick-off event for “A Day of Dialogue” on campus. After the college had spent the previous school year “participating in a national conversation about inclusiveness and discrimination, about identity and community, about who we are and who we hope to become,” the faculty suggested that classes be canceled for a day to allow time for the community to “center ourselves . . . and listen to one another, where we set a goal to be able to go forward as a community in diversity–not have one day of dialogue but catalyze deeper inquiry together as a part of who we are, our very core.” 7

The schedule for the day was full, and students were engaged in facilitated conversations on various topics. Every session room I saw was full, and students were listening to each other intently. At lunchtime, students were randomly assigned to eat lunch together in student spaces that they might not otherwise enter. I joined a group of students having lunch in one of the fraternity houses. Many of the students had never been in it before, and the young White man who served as one of the hosts acknowledged that he, too, had avoided spaces on campus that felt unfamiliar to him. For example, he had never entered the Black Cultural Center, though he had been invited to programs there, or attended a Hillel event, though he had several Jewish friends, or made the time to attend the weekly International Student Coffee Hour. Student enthusiasm for the opportunity to enter unfamiliar territory and make new connections that day seemed genuine. The unanswered question was whether they could build on the day’s momentum for sustained engagement.

How might such meaningful engagement be created? I would argue that positive cross-group engagement can be achieved through the power of structured dialogue. Institutions that are intentional in stimulating such intellectual growth by providing formative experiences of dialogue across lines of difference (ideological as well as sociological) can help students develop the skills they need to be effective citizens in an increasingly complex world and, perhaps, help each other find common ground.

The University of Michigan has pioneered this strategy for sustained engagement through a residential learning community known as the Michigan Community Scholars Program ( MCSP ). Established in 1999, the MCSP has an inspiring mission statement:

The Michigan Community Scholars Program is a residential learning community emphasizing deep learning, engaged community, meaningful civic engagement/community service learning, and intercultural understanding and dialogue. Students, faculty, community partners, and staff think critically about issues of community, seek to model a just, diverse, and democratic community, and wish to make a difference throughout their lives as participants and leaders involved in local, national, and global communities. 8

The learning community is made up of 120 first-year students and their resident advisers, as well as ten to fifteen faculty members linked to the program. An intentionally diverse community, the MCSP interrupts the experience of segregated residential communities from which the students typically come. The MCSP uniquely brings together service-learning, diversity, and dialogue in a powerful way. Unlike the typical residence hall experience in which students from different backgrounds might pass each other in the hallway without really engaging one another, at the core of the MCSP experience is the opportunity, indeed the requirement, for intergroup dialogue. As part of the residential experience, the students take a seminar together and participate in various structured dialogues in the residence hall.

While visiting the University of Michigan in the fall of 2016, just a month before the U.S. presidential election, I facilitated a focus group of MCSP students and heard all speak eloquently about how much they had gained from the program. They also shared how different their experiences were from their classmates’ who were not participating in such a program. In the midst of a campaign season characterized by rancorous debate and divisive rhetoric, these students were deeply engaged with each other, across lines of difference, and were learning how to talk with one another about hard topics rather than talking past one another or avoiding interaction altogether.

The value of these cross-group connections was made more salient by racist acts that took place on campus during that semester. White supremacist posters with explicitly anti-Black content were posted around the Michigan campus, creating a hostile environment for Black students who felt under attack. One young African-American woman, still in her first year, explained, “It’s hard to focus [on your schoolwork] when there’s so much hateful stuff. . . . It’s hard to know who to trust . . . . It takes energy to reach out to Whites without knowing if they are ‘safe.’ MCSP helps with that.” A White woman in her cohort was quick to second that sentiment, even though as a White student she was not the target of hateful rhetoric. She added, “ MCSP is the only place where I’ve constantly felt supported, listened to, and understood.”

In a qualitative study of the impact of the MCSP on students’ growth relative to social justice outcomes, Rebecca Christensen, Michigan’s director of engaged learning, found that nineteen out of twenty-two participants exhibited greater cognitive, affective, and behavioral empathy toward others, and were actively engaged in educating others and “speaking out” against injustice. They had heightened motivation to “create small-scale change in their everyday lives” and to “incorporate social justice into their future careers.” Of the various curricular, cocurricular, and informal MCSP -affiliated activities that facilitated their growth, students identified the dialogues both in and outside of the classroom as the most influential. 9

Though only a small number of students (relative to the thousands who attend the University of Michigan) have the opportunity to participate in the residential MCSP , it serves as an excellent model that could be expanded at Michigan and certainly replicated on other campuses. Alternatively, Michigan students also have the option to register for one of the dialogue courses offered by the Program on Intergroup Relations ( IGR ). The first program of its kind in the nation, founded in 1988, the IGR precedes the MCSP by a decade. Described as a social justice education program, the IGR blends theory and experiential learning to facilitate students’ learning about social group identity, social inequality, and intergroup relations. It is intentional in its effort to prepare students to live and work in a diverse world and educate them in making choices that advance equity, justice, and peace. 10

What exactly are the dialogues? Defined by Ximena Zúñiga, one of the original architects of the Michigan IGR program, and her colleagues, an intergroup dialogue is a facilitated, face-to-face encounter that seeks to foster meaningful engagement between members of two or more social identity groups that have a history of conflict (for example, Whites and people of color or Arabs and Jews). 11 The identity groups (defined by race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation, ability status, or national origin) are balanced in size, with five to seven participants from each group, and carefully designed to address issues of social group identity, conflict, community, and social justice. Emphasizing both process and content, the credit-bearing courses use a four-stage model that provides a developmental sequence for the dialogue: 1) creating a shared meaning of dialogue; 2) identity, social relations, and conflict; 3) issues of social justice; and 4) alliances and empowerment. At the heart of the methodology is cultivating the capacity to listen, a skill that is central to the practice of dialogue.

Does dialogue lead to social action? The research evidence suggests the answer is yes! Both White students and students of color who participate in dialogue demonstrate attitudinal and behavioral changes, including: increased self-awareness about issues of power and privilege, greater awareness of the institutionalization of race and racism in the United States, better cross-racial interactions, less fear of race-related conflict, and greater participation in social change actions during and after college. 12 A multiuniversity study of intergroup dialogue programs found that participants increase their capacity for intergroup empathy and their motivation to connect with people different from themselves. This is especially significant since longitudinal research shows that these changes endure beyond the time of participation in the dialogues. 13

Increasingly recognized as a high-impact educational practice, dialogue programs are spreading to other campuses. Zúñiga now teaches at the University of Massachusetts in the social justice education program, where she is training graduate students who want to become expert in dialogue facilitation and related research. As at Michigan, UM ass offers intergroup dialogue courses. I had the opportunity to sit in on two group dialogue sessions in November 2016, just ten days after the presidential election. It was powerful to hear students talking about how they had been able to use their dialogic skills outside of class to have difficult conversations with peers about the election at a time when so many of their elders were struggling to have such conversations themselves.

The ripple effects of the Michigan and UM ass models can be seen at Skidmore College, where sociologist Kristie Ford is now the director of the Skidmore intergroup relations program, which has adapted the Michigan model to suit Skidmore’s small campus. In 2012, Skidmore became the first college or university in the United States to offer a minor in intergroup relations. (Even though it is the leader in intergroup dialogue, the University of Michigan did not establish its intergroup relations minor until 2015.) Unlike UM ass or the University of Michigan, Skidmore is a liberal arts college and does not have a ready supply of graduate students to serve as dialogue facilitators. Instead, Skidmore focuses on developing peer facilitators to lead the dialogue groups. Facilitators are selected based on their academic performance, developmental maturity, leadership potential, and demonstrated facilitation ability. They take at least three courses over a three-semester period as preparation, and they are provided ongoing support and supervision from a faculty member during their peer-facilitation experience. In her book Facilitating Change through Intergroup Dialogue: Social Justice Advocacy in Practice, Ford documents the postgraduate effects on those undergraduates who learned to be facilitators. Their commitment to social justice is evidenced in their career choices and their continued growth as White allies and as empowered people of color. 14

The IGR model has recently been adapted for use in high schools. In one study, trained college students, serving as near-peer facilitators, led eight weekly dialogues with students in a racially diverse high school, designed to engage the younger students in exploring identity, building cross-group relationships, and learning how to intervene in intergroup conflict. As with the college examples, the dialogues with younger adolescents were impactful. Students “deepened their ability to think critically about racial issues and listen actively to others’ opinions,” proving the dialogues to be “an effective intervention model for promoting civil discourse on race in this hyperpartisan age.” 15

While it is clear that intergroup dialogue can be an effective tool for building bridges and perhaps reducing what Dr. King referred to as the “fears, prejudice, pride and irrationality, which are the barriers to a truly integrated society,” there are those who are understandably hesitant to participate. Among them are students of color who fear that the dialogue process will place the heavy burden of educating their White peers on their shoulders. In his essay on the challenges of being a Black professor whose scholarship is on race, George Yancy writes not only of his experience with racism in the academy, but also about the frustration students of color express about the futility of talking to White people about racism.

Some of my students of color have asked me, “Why talk about race with white people when at the end of the day everything remains the same–that is, their racism continues?” “Why teach courses on race and whiteness?” “Do you really think that such courses will make a difference?” 16

I hear similar questions from students of color on the predominantly White campuses I regularly visit. They wonder if it is worth the emotional energy required to try to explain what it is like to be the target of someone’s malice or the object of someone’s indifference. Is it their obligation, they ask, to educate fellow students about history that should have already been learned, or experiences with racism that are painful to recall and exhausting to explain? Some people of color have concluded it is not worth the emotional cost.

Though journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge lives in Great Britain, her 2014 blog post on why she does not want to engage with most White people in conversations about race has resonated with many people of color in the United States. She expanded on her post in a longer article for The Guardian :

On 22 February 2014, I published a post on my blog. I titled it “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race.” It read: “I’m no longer engaging with white people on the topic of race. Not all white people, just the vast majority who refuse to accept the existence of structural racism and its symptoms. I can no longer engage with the gulf of an emotional disconnect that white people display when a person of colour articulates their experience. You can see their eyes shut down and harden. It’s like treacle is poured into their ears, blocking up their ear canals. It’s like they can no longer hear us.” 17

The frustration of feeling unheard again and again can be a significant source of stress for an already vulnerable population. According to a national survey conducted in 2018, students of color report higher rates of emotional distress in their freshman year than White students and are more likely to keep their difficulties to themselves. They are half as likely as their White peers to seek out counseling, yet they need support. 18 That support is often found through affinity groups and in designated cultural spaces on campus.

Some faculty and administrators question the value of such spaces, sometimes referred to as “safe spaces.” Such places might be more accurately described as “refueling spaces,” where students feeling depleted from the ongoing effort to navigate unfamiliar or hostile social environments can relax and recharge their energy with other students who share and therefore understand their experiences. Alumni of color often acknowledge the importance of this kind of emotional support for their success in an otherwise alienating environment. In a recent conversation with a Native woman who graduated from a highly selective university, she acknowledged that she “never would have made it through without the Native American Cultural Center,” where she spent much of her free time. In an essay about her undergraduate experience at the University of Missouri from 1997 to 2001, historian Marcia Chatelain describes the racial harassment she and other student activists were subjected to in the form of threatening letters, strange phone calls, and frightening emails, delivering messages about “who needed to shut up and die.”

Conjuring up those memories makes my stomach churn . . . . Pranks or promises? You never knew . . . . You sink into a hypervigilance that some read as paranoia. But the humiliation and fear become a part of you. Every cell of your 19-year old body holds the anxiety of the moments when you are put in your place because you dared to come into someone else’s home and thought you could make it yours too. . . . When critics mock students for wanting safe spaces, they often argue that political correctness is undermining education and that students today are “too sensitive.” Rarely do I ever hear any curiosity about what students are seeking shelter from; when my friends and I peered around the corners of our sprawling campus, dissenting opinions were the least of our worries. 19

Twenty years later, with hate crimes on the rise since the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, the fear she describes is part of another generation’s college experience. 20 The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate-motivated incidents, reports that schools, both K –12 and higher ed institutions, have been the most common venues for hate incidents. 21 Add to that the “you don’t belong here” message conveyed by frequent social media documentation of White people calling the police to report “suspicious” Black people doing ordinary, quite lawful things like sitting in Starbucks waiting for someone or taking a nap in the common room of one’s own residence hall; or the “stop speaking Spanish” demands directed at Latinx shoppers in a store; or the casual “Where are you REALLY from?” questions asked of Asian-American citizens, too often viewed as “foreigners” in the country of their birth. It is easy to understand why students of color will tell you they are “tired” and why they might want to refuel in the welcoming company of each other.

In her 2018 book Race on Campus: Debunking Myths with Data , higher ed scholar Julie Park summarizes research demonstrating that the involvement of students of color, particularly Black and Latinx students, with ethnic student organizations is linked with a deeper sense of campus belonging and greater cross-racial campus engagement.

Ethnic student organizations play a vital role in not just helping retain students of color: they also contribute to the broader campus racial climate by promoting interracial interaction, giving students of color space to recharge their batteries and navigate a diverse and at times racially charged environment. 22

Though it may seem counterintuitive that affinity group opportunities would promote higher rates of overall interracial contact, if we understand that people are more willing to take risks when they are operating from an internal sense of strength, it makes sense that the experience of affirmation and belonging found in affinity groups could serve as a launching pad for greater cross-campus engagement and eventual participation in the challenging work of intergroup dialogue.

As noted earlier, White adults represent the demographic group with the lowest rates of casual interracial contact and interracial friendship. The same is true of young White students. 23 Consequently, Whites have their own anxieties about engaging in intergroup dialogue. During my years of teaching a course on the psychology of racism at predominantly White institutions, my White students often expressed fear that because of their limited knowledge and experience interacting with people of color, they might ask a naive question or make an offensive remark. This student’s comment was typical: “The fear of speaking is overwhelming. I do not feel, for me, that it is fear of rejection from people of my race, but anger and disdain from people of color.” Another acknowledged, “Fear requires us to be honest with not only others, but with ourselves. Often this much honesty is difficult for many of us, for it would permit our insecurities and ignorance to surface . . . . Rather than publicly admit our weaknesses, we remain silent.” 24

The retreat into silence is just one of several strategies commonly used by White students when they experience discomfort in conversations about race. Multicultural education scholar Robin DiAngelo has coined the term “white fragility” to describe the emotional response to such discomfort: “A state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.” 25

Framing White fragility as a lack of stamina in the face of racial discomfort, DiAngelo explains that it results in part from racial isolation and the deeply ingrained expectation of racial comfort that comes from the daily experience of “racial belonging” that White people typically share in a White-dominated society. She writes, “In virtually every situation or context deemed normal, neutral or prestigious in society, [White people] belong racially. This belonging is a deep and ever-present feeling . . . . It is rare to experience a sense of not belonging racially, and these are usually very temporary, easily avoidable situations.” DiAngelo further enumerates a common set of racial patterns that are “the foundation of white fragility,” including: a demonstrated preference for racial segregation, a lack of understanding about the systemic nature of racism (focusing instead on acts of mean-spirited individuals), seeing themselves as individuals who are “exempt from the forces of racial socialization,” a reluctance to acknowledge the significance of history, an inclination to make assumptions about the universality of their experience, an unwillingness to listen closely to the racial experiences of others, a tendency to dismiss what is not understood, a desire to jump over the hard, personal work of self-examination and get to “solutions,” a need to maintain solidarity with other Whites (such as by not confronting them when they say or do something racially offensive), feeling paralyzed by guilt, taking a defensive stance toward any suggestions that they are connected to racism, and maintaining a focus on intentions rather than impact. 26 White fragility serves to maintain a sense of equilibrium in the face of racial discomfort.

White equilibrium is a cocoon of racial comfort, centrality, superiority, entitlement, racial apathy, and obliviousness, all rooted in an identity of being good people free of racism. Challenging this cocoon throws off our racial balance. Because being racially off balance is so rare, we have not had to build the capacity to sustain the discomfort. Thus, whites find these challenges unbearable and want them to stop. 27

Such framing helps us understand why exposure to stamina-building activities like dialogue can be an appropriate intervention. That said, some prework may be needed before White students can be effective dialogue partners. An Asian-American woman in one of my classes explained,

The process of talking about [racism] is not easy. We people of color can’t always make it easier for White people to talk about race relations because sometimes they need to break away from that familiar and safe ground of being neutral or silent . . . . I understand that [some are] trying but sometimes they need to take bigger steps and more risks. As an Asian in America, I am always taking risks when I share my experiences of racism, however the dominant culture expects it of me. . . . Even though I am embarrassed and sometimes get too emotional about these issues, I talk about them because I want to be honest about how I feel. 28

She is ready to break the silence, but too often her White peers are not. They need more practice.

So what are campus leaders to do? I return to the example of the University of Michigan. Not only do they have intergroup dialogues but they have intragroup dialogues: opportunities for students with shared identities to have facilitated conversations among themselves; students of color in dialogue with each other, as well as White students exploring with other White students why talking about racism is so hard for them and how to become better allies to those who do not experience the same kind of racial belonging on campus that they do. In this context, intergroup dialogue is important, but intragroup dialogue has value, too.

It is certain that without understanding the context of intragroup dialogue, some people see such homogeneous offerings as the institutional sanctioning of segregated gatherings (perhaps even a throwback to our Jim Crow history), and consequently respond very negatively to the idea. For example, when the University of Maryland Counseling Center posted signs advertising a group called “White Awake: A group for White students to talk about race,” described as a “safe space for White students to explore their experiences, questions, reactions, and feelings,” the social media response was rapid and largely negative. One student of color posted, “Why do they need to attend therapy sessions on how to be a decent human being in society? Why do they need to have these sessions to learn how to coexist?” 29 A White National Review commentator wrote,

It should seem clear to anyone with a brain that the best way to learn about issues related to other races is to interact with people of other races. Creating a forum to discuss such issues that intentionally excludes non-white people is doing everyone a disservice. The best way to learn about any kind of experience is to learn from someone who has actually gone through it, and this group will have no opportunities for that. 30

Implied in this last comment are the assumptions that White students live outside of the structures of racism, and that students of color should be their teachers, exactly the kind of assumptions many students of color find so problematic.

In response to the critiques, the university changed the name of the group to “Anti-Racism and Ally Building Group,” clarifying its intended purpose. A statement issued by the counseling center staff explained: “The aim of this group is to help White students become more culturally competent, so they can better participate in creating a more inclusive environment at the University of Maryland.” 31 Seen through the conceptual lens of White fragility, the counseling center initiative could be understood as an effort to build White students’ stamina for racial dialogue and relieve students of color of some of the burden of educating their White peers.

If we are clear that the purpose of affinity groups for students of color and ally-building groups for White students is in fact to increase or strengthen the capacity of students to engage meaningfully with each other, the wisdom of providing intragroup dialogues as a campus resource is apparent. The long history of segregated communities in our society has left us with a population of students who arrive at our campus with little previous experience of the kind of empathic contact that Martin Luther King described as necessary for meaningful social change. They should leave better prepared than they arrived. Building that capacity requires a multifaceted approach. In the case of intergroup or intragroup dialogue, it is not an either-or choice, but rather a both-and strategy.

Some people believe that talking about race only makes race relations in our society worse. Silencing the conversation, however, is just another way to maintain the status quo. You cannot solve a problem without talking about it. Learning how to have this dialogue is a necessary part of moving forward as a healthy society. It is of particular importance that White people who want to see social change learn how to have the conversation, not just with people of color, but with their White peers as well. As social justice educator Lee Anne Bell has written, “ Refusing to talk about powerful social realities does not make them go away but rather allows racial illiteracy, confusion and misinformation to persist unchallenged.” 32

Rather than avoiding hard conversations, through dialogue together and sometimes in same-race groups alone, students can help each other see the past more clearly and understand and communicate with others more fully in the present. With some help, they can find ways to work together in coalition for the betterment of our communities tomorrow and for the health of our democracy.

• 1 Steve Phillips, Brown is the New White: How the Demographic Revolution Has Created a New American Majority (New York: The New Press, 2016).
• 2 Marta Tienda, “Diversity as a Strategic Advantage: A Sociodemographic Perspective,” in Our Compelling Interests: The Value of Diversity for Democracy and a Prosperous Society , ed. Earl Lewis and Nancy Cantor (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), 204.
• 3 Carl Kaestle, “Federalism and Inequality in Education: What Can History Tell Us?” in The Dynamics of Opportunity in America: Evidence and Perspectives , ed. Irwin Kirsch and Henry Braun (Princeton, N.J.: Educational Testing Service, 2016), 35–96.
• 4 Thomas J. Sugrue, “Less Separate, Still Unequal: Diversity and Equality in ‘Post-Civil Rights’ America,” in Our Compelling Interests: The Value of Diversity for Democracy and a Prosperous Society , ed. Lewis and Cantor, 39–70.
• 5 Robert P. Jones, “ Self Segregation: Why It’s So Hard for Whites to Understand Ferguson ,” The Atlantic , August 21, 2014.
• 6 Deidre Fernandes, “The Majority of Harvard’s Incoming Class Is Nonwhite,” The Boston Globe , August 3, 2017.
• 7 Franklin and Marshall College, “ Day of Dialogue Welcome Ceremony ,” YouTube, uploaded October 6, 2016.
• 8 Michigan Community Scholars Program, University of Michigan, “ Mission, History & Goals .”
• 9 Rebecca Dora Christensen, “‘Making a Difference’: Residential Learning Community Students’ Trajectories toward Promoting Social Justice” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2016).
• 10 For more information, see Program on Intergroup Relations, University of Michigan, “ About the Program on Intergroup Relations .”
• 11 Ximena Zúñiga, Biren (Ratnesh) A. Nagda, Mark Chesler, and Adena Cytron-Walker, Intergroup Dialogue in Higher Education: Meaningful Learning About Social Justice, ASHE Higher Education Report Series Vol. 32, Num. 4 (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007).
• 12 Kristie A. Ford, ed., Facilitating Change Through Intergroup Dialogue: Social Justice Advocacy in Practice (New York: Routledge, 2018).
• 13 Patricia Gurin, Biren (Ratnesh) A. Nagda, and Ximena Zúñiga, Dialogue Across Difference: Practice, Theory and Research on Intergroup Dialogue (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2013), 168–175.
• 14 Ford, Facilitating Change Through Intergroup Dialogue .
• 15 Donna Rich Kaplowitz, Jasmine A. Lee, and Sheri L. Seyka, “Looking to Near Peers to Guide Student Discussions about Race,” Phi Delta Kappan 99 (5) (2018): 51–53.
• 16 George Yancy, “ The Ugly Truth of Being a Black Professor in America ,” Chronicle of Higher Education , April 29, 2018.
• 17 Reni Eddo-Lodge, “ Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race ,” The Guardian , May 30, 2017.
• 18 Annelle B. Primm, “ College Students of Color: Confronting the Complexities of Diversity, Culture, and Mental Health ,” Higher Education Today, April 2, 2018.
• 19 Marcia Chatelain, “ What Mizzou Taught Me ,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2015.
• 20 Christopher Mathias, “ Exclusive: New Report Offers Proof of U.S. Hate Crime Rise in the Trump Era ,” HuffPost , September 17, 2017.
• 21 Southern Poverty Law Center, Ten Days After: Harassment and Intimidation in the Aftermath of the Election (Montgomery: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016).
• 22 Julie J. Park, Race on Campus: Debunking Myths with Data (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Education Press, 2018), 25–26.
• 23 Ibid., 3.
• 24 Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race , twentieth anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 332.
• 25 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018), 57.
• 26 Ibid., 51–69.
• 27 Ibid., 112.
• 28 Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? 335.
• 29 Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, “ The Kids Are All White ,” Inside Higher Ed, September 14, 2018.
• 30 Katherine Timpf, “ College Under Fire for Dumbest Social-Justice Effort Yet ,” National Review, September 18, 2018.
• 31 Bauer-Wolf, “The Kids Are All White.”
• 32 Lee Anne Bell, “Telling on Racism: Developing a Race-Conscious Agenda,” in The Myth of Racial Color Blindness , ed. Helen A. Neville, Miguel E. Gallardo, and Derald Wing Sue (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2016), 2297–2298 [Kindle locations].

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Illustration: Paige Vickers

Making Lehigh an Antiracist University

George Floyd killing prompts activism, candid dialogue.

Mary Ellen Alu

• Diversity & Inclusion

On May 25, 2020, George Perry Floyd Jr., a 46-year-old African American man who had lost his security job in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, was arrested by Minneapolis police on suspicion of trying to buy cigarettes with a counterfeit $20 bill. During the arrest, a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, killing him. In a chilling video of the arrest, Floyd repeatedly pleaded “I can’t breathe,” but the officer did not let up.

Floyd’s killing sparked outrage across the country and around the globe, leading to sustained, mass protests over police brutality and racial oppression, congressional hearings on police violence against minorities, and calls for reform and police department defunding.

The anger boiled over at Lehigh, with more than 2,300 members of the Lehigh community signing an open letter to President John D. Simon ’19P and Board of Trustees Chairman Kevin Clayton ’84 ’13P that called for an end to institutional racism at Lehigh and in the country.

Among the demands in the open letter were a more diverse workforce, public listening sessions at which the community could air concerns, and meaningful, structural support for Black students, faculty and staff and other vulnerable groups.

The Black Student Union and the Student Senate at Lehigh together hosted a Black Lives Matter Town Hall over Zoom to highlight black student voices and to candidly discuss issues of diversity and inclusivity on campus.

“The responsibility for building a just Lehigh rests with its most privileged members—white, high-paid workers—not on employees and students who belong to marginalized racial and ethnic groups,” the open letter stated. “They have done that work for too long. Valuing Black lives means more than penning statements. We demand anti-racist action.”

The open letter also laid bare how systemic racism resulted in the COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately affecting communities of color and low-paid but essential workers.

Also, in early June, the Black Student Union and the Student Senate at Lehigh together hosted a Black Lives Matter Town Hall over Zoom to highlight black student voices and to candidly discuss issues of diversity and inclusivity on campus. Senior leadership joined the virtual town hall to listen to the students’ concerns as well as those of other members of the Lehigh community.

In a written response to the open letter, Simon and Clayton said they recognized that members of the Lehigh community were angry and fearful and that they would support them.

“We know the authors and signers of the letter delivered their message with the measurable purpose to make Lehigh better,” they continued. “We share that goal and thank them for the commitment to our university. We need to make Lehigh University an actively antiracist institution. By this, we mean actively speaking out and addressing acts of racism, racist comments, racist practices, policies and procedures.”

While accepting their responsibility to create the needed change, Simon and Clayton also pointed to the need for broader involvement of the Lehigh community in the difficult conversations and challenging decisions that can lead to sustainable change.

Lehigh planned a comprehensive review of university policies and procedures to ensure they are antiracist and promote equity, including an examination of tenure and promotion, hiring practices, student conduct and student recruitment. As a first step, an independent review began of the Lehigh University Police Department’s policies and operating procedures. In addition, the Provost’s Office was to work with the Faculty Senate to update curriculum and faculty training to promote understanding of implicit biases and other topics, with the involvement of the student leaders of campus cultural groups.

In reaffirming the need to stand together as a community and fight against systemic discrimination and racial disparities, Lehigh also formed the Community Conversations About Race (CCAR) team. Donald Outing, Lehigh’s vice president for equity and community and the diversity and inclusion officer, said CCAR will hold monthly discussions on race-related learning that is open to the Lehigh community as well as the larger Lehigh Valley community.

The Council for Equity and Community (CEC) , an independent advisory board formed in 2008 and made up of staff, faculty and students, also encourages constructive dialogue and works toward building a stronger campus community.

“The racist actions and attitudes experienced by students and others in our community are unacceptable to us,” the Lehigh trustees wrote to the Lehigh Black Student Union. “Despite our past efforts and actions, we have much more to do to address such behavior We pledge to do more and to do better.”

Hear more voices from around Lehigh as they react to George Floyd’s killing. Go to go.lehigh.edu/racialinjustice .

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For black Americans, experiences of racial discrimination vary by education level, gender

Personal experiences with racial discrimination are common for black Americans. But certain segments within this group – most notably, those who are college educated or male – are more likely to say they’ve faced certain situations because of their race, according to a new Pew Research Center survey .

A majority of black adults say they have been discriminated against because of their race, but this varies by education. Roughly eight-in-ten blacks with at least some college experience (81%) say they’ve experienced racial discrimination, at least from time to time, including 17% who say this happens regularly. Among blacks with a high school education or less, these shares are lower – 69% and 9%, respectively.

When asked about specific situations they may have experienced because of their race, blacks who have attended college are more likely than those without college experience to say they have faced a number of these incidents: people acting as if they were suspicious of them (71% vs. 59%), people acting as if they were not smart (67% vs. 52%) or being subjected to slurs or jokes (58% vs. 45%). Half of blacks with at least some college experience also say they have feared for their personal safety because of their race. That share drops to about a third (34%) among those with less education.

College-educated blacks are also more inclined to believe their race has negatively impacted their ability to succeed: 57% of blacks with at least some college experience believe being black has hurt their ability to get ahead, compared with 47% of those with a high school education or less.

This pattern has been consistent across multiple surveys. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey found similar educational gaps among blacks in experiences with discrimination. And a 2017 NPR poll found that being subjected to racial slurs or offensive comments was more common among blacks with a college degree than those with less education.

So why is this? Other researchers suggest that college-educated blacks are more likely to work in predominately white environments, which may lead to greater exposure to race-related prejudices or stresses. One scholar noted that college itself may offer blacks more opportunities to discuss race and discrimination through classes and organizations, thereby raising their awareness of these issues.

Beyond educational differences, experiences with certain forms of discrimination also differ by gender. This is most evident in reported interactions with law enforcement. In the new survey, 59% of black men say they have been unfairly stopped by the police because of their race, compared with 31% of black women. Black men are also more likely than black women to say people have acted as if they were suspicious of them, that they’ve been subjected to slurs or jokes, or that someone assumed they were racist or prejudiced because of their racial background.

Still, some experiences are equally common for both groups. Among blacks, similar shares of men and women say they have feared for their personal safety, that people have acted as if they were not smart, or that they’ve been treated unfairly in hiring, pay or promotion because of their race. There are also no gender differences when it comes to general experiences with racial discrimination.

Other factors are not strongly associated with facing specific types of discrimination. Black adults under the age of 50 are just as likely as those 50 and older to say they’ve faced certain situations because of their race. For example, 54% of blacks ages 18 to 49 say they have been subject to slurs or jokes because of their race, which is similar to the share among those 50 and older (50%). Additionally, skin tone is not necessarily correlated with encountering these types of situations. More specifically, blacks who identify as having lighter skin are about as likely as those with a deeper complexion to say they’ve faced specific situations because of their race.

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Monica Anderson is a director of research at Pew Research Center .

An Early Look at Black Voters’ Views on Biden, Trump and Election 2024

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Hear Something, Say Something: Navigating The World Of Racial Awkwardness

Listen to this week's episode.

We've all been there — having fun relaxing with friends and family, when someone says something a little racially off. Sometimes it's subtle, like the friend who calls Thai food "exotic." Other times it's more overt, like that in-law who's always going on about "the illegals."

In any case, it can be hard to know how to respond. Even the most level-headed among us have faltered trying to navigate the fraught world of racial awkwardness.

So what exactly do you do? We delve into the issue on this week's episode of the Code Switch podcast, featuring writer Nicole Chung and Code Switch's Shereen Marisol Meraji, Gene Demby and Karen Grigsby Bates.

We also asked some folks to write about what runs through their minds during these tense moments, and how they've responded (or not). Their reactions ran the gamut from righteous indignation to total passivity, but in the wake of these uncomfortable comments, everyone seemed to walk away wishing they'd done something else.

Aaron E. Sanchez

It was the first time my dad visited me at college, and he had just dropped me off at my dorm. My suitemate walked in and sneered.

"Was that your dad?" he asked. "He looks sooo Mexican."

Aaron E. Sanchez is a Texas-based writer who focuses on issues of race, politics and popular culture from a Latino perspective. Courtesy of Aaron Sanchez hide caption

He kept laughing about it as he left my room.

I was caught off-guard. Instantly, I grew self-conscious, not because I was ashamed of my father, but because my respectability politics ran deep. My appearance was supposed to be impeccable and my manners unimpeachable to protect against stereotypes and slights. I felt exposed.

To be sure, when my dad walked into restaurants and stores, people almost always spoke to him in Spanish. He didn't mind. The fluidity of his bilingualism rarely failed him. He was unassuming. He wore his working-class past on his frame and in his actions. He enjoyed hard work and appreciated it in others. Yet others mistook him for something altogether different.

People regularly confused his humility for servility. He was mistaken for a landscape worker, a janitor, and once he sat next to a gentleman on a plane who kept referring to him as a "wetback." He was a poor Mexican-American kid who grew up in the Segundo Barrio of El Paso, Texas, for certain. But he was also an Air Force veteran who had served for 20 years. He was an electrical engineer, a proud father, an admirable storyteller, and a pretty decent fisherman.

I didn't respond to my suitemate. To him, my father was a funny caricature, a curio he could pick up, purchase and discard. And as much as it was hidden beneath my elite, liberal arts education, I was a novelty to him too, an even rarer one at that. Instead of a serape, I came wrapped in the trappings of middle-classness, a costume I was trying desperately to wear convincingly.

That night, I realized that no clothing or ill-fitting costume could cover us. Our bodies were incongruous to our surroundings. No matter how comfortable we were in our skins, our presence would make others uncomfortable.

Karen Good Marable

When the Q train pulled into the Cortelyou Road station, it was dark and I was tired. Another nine hours in New York City, working in the madness that is Midtown as a fact-checker at a fashion magazine. All day long, I researched and confirmed information relating to beauty, fashion and celebrity, and, at least once a day, suffered an editor who was openly annoyed that I'd discovered an error. Then, the crush of the rush-hour subway, and a dinner obligation I had to fulfill before heading home to my cat.

Karen Good Marable is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been featured in publications like The Undefeated and The New Yorker. Courtesy of Karen Good Marable hide caption

The train doors opened and I turned the corner to walk up the stairs. Coming down were two girls — free, white and in their 20s . They were dancing as they descended, complete with necks rolling, mouths pursed — a poor affectation of black girls — and rapping as they passed me:

Now I ain't sayin she a golddigger/But she ain't messin' with no broke niggas!

That last part — broke niggas — was actually less rap, more squeals that dissolved into giggles. These white girls were thrilled to say the word publicly — joyously, even — with the permission of Kanye West.

I stopped, turned around and stared at them. I envisioned kicking them both squarely in their backs. God didn't give me telekinetic powers for just this reason. I willed them to turn around and face me, but they did not dare. They bopped on down the stairs and onto the platform, not evening knowing the rest of the rhyme.

Listen: I'm a black woman from the South. I was born in the '70s and raised by parents — both educators — who marched for their civil rights. I never could get used to nigga being bandied about — not by the black kids and certainly not by white folks. I blamed the girls' parents for not taking over where common sense had clearly failed. Hell, even radio didn't play the nigga part.

I especially blamed Kanye West for not only making the damn song, but for having the nerve to make nigga a part of the damn hook.

Life in NYC is full of moments like this, where something happens and you wonder if you should speak up or stay silent (which can also feel like complicity). I am the type who will speak up . Boys (or men) cussing incessantly in my presence? Girls on the train cussing around my 70-year-old mama? C'mon, y'all. Do you see me? Do you hear yourselves? Please. Stop.

But on this day, I just didn't feel like running down the stairs to tap those girls on the shoulder and school them on what they damn well already knew. On this day, I just sighed a great sigh, walked up the stairs, past the turnstiles and into the night.

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

When I was 5 or 6, my mother asked me a question: "Does anyone ever make fun of you for the color of your skin?"

This surprised me. I was born to a Mexican woman who had married an Anglo man, and I was fairly light-skinned compared to the earth-brown hue of my mother. When she asked me that question, I began to understand that I was different.

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza is a visiting assistant professor of ethics at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. Courtesy of Robyn Henderson-Espinoza hide caption

Following my parents' divorce in the early 1980s, I spent a considerable amount of time with my father and my paternal grandparents. One day in May of 1989, I was sitting at my grandparents' dinner table in West Texas. I was 12. The adults were talking about the need for more laborers on my grandfather's farm, and my dad said this:

"Mexicans are lazy."

He called the undocumented workers he employed on his 40 acres "wetbacks." Again and again, I heard from him that Mexicans always had to be told what to do. He and friends would say this when I was within earshot. I felt uncomfortable. Why would my father say these things about people like me?

But I remained silent.

It haunts me that I didn't speak up. Not then. Not ever. I still hear his words, 10 years since he passed away, and wonder whether he thought I was a lazy Mexican, too. I wish I could have found the courage to tell him that Mexicans are some of the hardest-working people I know; that those brown bodies who worked on his property made his lifestyle possible.

As I grew in experience and understanding, I was able to find language that described what he was doing: stereotyping, undermining, demonizing. I found my voice in the academy and in the movement for black and brown lives.

Still, the silence haunts me.

Channing Kennedy

My 20s were defined in no small part by a friendship with a guy I never met. For years, over email and chat, we shared everything with each other, and we made great jokes. Those jokes — made for each other only — were a foundational part of our relationship and our identities. No matter what happened, we could make each other laugh.

Channing Kennedy is an Oakland-based writer, performer, media producer and racial equity trainer. Courtesy of Channing Kennedy hide caption

It helped, also, that we were slackers with spare time, but eventually we both found callings. I started working in the social justice sector, and he gained recognition in the field of indie comics. I was proud of my new job and approached it seriously, if not gracefully. Before I took the job, I was the type of white dude who'd make casually racist comments in front of people I considered friends. Now, I had laid a new foundation for myself and was ready to undo the harm I'd done pre-wokeness.

And I was proud of him, too, if cautious. The indie comics scene is full of bravely offensive work: the power fantasies of straight white men with grievances against their nonexistent censors, put on defiant display. But he was my friend, and he wouldn't fall for that.

One day he emailed me a rough script to get my feedback. At my desk, on a break from deleting racist, threatening Facebook comments directed at my co-workers, I opened it up for a change of pace.

I got none. His script was a top-tier, irredeemable power fantasy — sex trafficking, disability jokes, gendered violence, every scene's background packed with commentary-devoid, racist caricatures. It also had a pop culture gag on top, to guarantee clicks.

I asked him why he'd written it. He said it felt "important." I suggested he shelve it. He suggested that that would be a form of censorship. And I realized this: My dear friend had created a racist power fantasy about dismembering women, and he considered it bravely offensive.

I could have said that there was nothing brave about catering to the established tastes of other straight white comics dudes. I could have dropped any number of half-understood factoids about structural racism, the finishing move of the recently woke. I could have just said the jokes were weak.

Instead, I became cruel to him, with a dedication I'd previously reserved for myself.

Over months, I redirected every bit of our old creativity. I goaded him into arguments I knew would leave him shaken and unable to work. I positioned myself as a surrogate parent (so I could tell myself I was still a concerned ally) then laughed at him. I got him to escalate. And, privately, I told myself it was me who was under attack, the one with the grievance, and I cried about how my friend was betraying me.

I wanted to erase him (I realized years later) not because his script offended me, but because it made me laugh. It was full of the sense of humor we'd spent years on — not the jokes verbatim, but the pacing, structure, reveals, go-to gags. It had my DNA and it was funny. I thought I had become a monster-slayer, but this comic was a monster with my hands and mouth.

After years as the best of friends and as the bitterest of exes, we finally had a chance to meet in person. We were little more than acquaintances with sunk costs at that point, but we met anyway. Maybe we both wanted forgiveness, or an apology, or to see if we still had some jokes. Instead, I lectured him about electoral politics and race in a bar and never smiled.

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Students shouldn’t shy away from talking about race in college essays, Biden officials say

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High school students shouldn’t shy away from talking about their race or ethnicity in college application essays, according to new guidance issued Monday by the Biden administration.

Similarly, school counselors, mentors, and employers should feel free to mention a student’s race in a college recommendation letter, the guidance states.

“The Supreme Court’s opinion recognized what we know to be true: That race can be relevant to a person’s life or lived experience and may impact one’s development, motivations, academic interests, or personal or professional aspirations,” Vanita Gupta, a top-ranking Justice Department official, told reporters on Monday. “That impact can still be considered in university admissions.”

The guidance package may offer some clarity as many high schoolers and school staff are trying to make sense of how the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling striking down race-based affirmative action affects what they should tell colleges about themselves and whether it’s advantageous — or risky — to talk about race in their applications. 

In June, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that college admissions officers could look at how race had affected an applicant’s life “through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

But some high school counselors have expressed concern that the Supreme Court’s decision could be confusing for students of color and lead some to avoid talking about their personal identities. 

The new guidance suggests, consistent with the court’s decision, that colleges may consider a student’s individual experience of race or racism, even though they cannot give advantages to students solely because of their race. 

The guidance is not legally binding, and what is and isn’t allowed likely will continue to be decided by courts.

Still, the guidance may shape how colleges and students respond to the ruling.

According to the guidance, admissions officers can consider how a student’s experience with racial discrimination or the racial composition of their neighborhood or school affected them and how that may influence what they’d contribute to the college.

For example, one student could write in an essay “about what it means to him to be the first Black violinist in his city’s youth orchestra.” Another student could detail how she overcame “prejudice when she transferred to a rural high school where she was the only student of South Asian descent.” A third applicant might discuss “how learning to cook traditional Hmong dishes from her grandmother sparked her passion for food and nurtured her sense of self.”

And a school counselor could write in their recommendation about “how an applicant conquered her feelings of isolation as a Latina student at an overwhelmingly white high school to join the debate team.”

“Students should feel comfortable presenting their whole selves when applying to college, without fear of stereotyping, bias, or discrimination,” two top Biden administration officials wrote in a letter . 

Colleges can still tailor recruitment to reach students of color

Though the Supreme Court’s ruling is about college admissions policies, some states and colleges have interpreted the decision to apply to financial aid . Missouri’s attorney general, for example, said that colleges cannot award scholarships that consider a student’s race or ethnicity, leading the state’s flagship university to eliminate a prestigious diversity award.

That left some education equity advocates worried that officials would point to the Supreme Court ruling to limit a slew of other efforts aimed at increasing racial diversity on college campuses.

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The Biden administration’s guidance is silent on scholarships — a top education department official said that was because the Supreme Court decision didn’t address scholarships — but it explicitly states that colleges don’t have to “ignore race” when they are identifying prospective students through recruitment efforts.

Colleges can target their outreach to schools and districts that predominantly serve students of color, the guidance states. They can also recruit from high schools that historically haven’t had many students apply to the college — which could be a strategy for recruiting students of color without considering race directly. 

Similarly, colleges and universities can also continue to run mentorship or pipeline programs meant to help prepare students from certain schools to attend that college. 

That could look like a summer enrichment camp designed for students who attend public high schools near the college. Colleges are also allowed to set aside slots for students who participate in those pipeline programs, as long as it was open to a broad group of kids — such as all juniors at a certain high school.

“Although this decision changes the landscape for admissions in higher education,” Gupta said, “it should not be used as an excuse to turn away from longstanding efforts to make those institutions more inclusive.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at [email protected].

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TPR: The Public's Radio

Personal essay: Grappling with internalized racism and Asian American identity

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Even as a child, I remember wanting to be white. I didn’t have the vocabulary then but there was a sense of inferiority I associated with my Asianness. This hollowed-out feeling arose whenever my mother spoke in broken English to the store cashier, or when I ate from a Zojirushi lunch thermos packed with rice, or when the guys in my class said they would only date white girls. 

My parents immigrated here in 1989 with no more than $500, even less according to my father. Whenever I brought up any of my racial qualms, my mother would say, “Your grandfather” who I called lao ye, “climbed three mountains without shoes to go to school every day. Both his mother and father passed away when he was a teenager.” Lao ye would become a CEO and travel to over fifty countries. My problems paled in comparison. With a mental image of my grandfather, I began placing academics ahead of my grapplings with race.

In my freshman year at Brown University, I planned on majoring in statistics. But because of our school’s open curriculum, I also decided to take my first sociology course with Professor Itzigsohn. It was called “Race, class, and ethnicity in the modern world.” His research and all of his data fascinated me. And when he mentioned how the Asian American population in the United States could use further exploration, I took the opportunity to propose a project with him. Our goal was to discover how Asian Americans fit into the racial and class structure in our country. 

I worked with thousands of cases of Asian Americans and understood their lives through data and I saw how Asian Americans who are allowed to immigrate to the United States have higher levels of income and education. They are heralded for their hard work and attainment of the American Dream. Under the guise of the “model minority myth,” the illusion of equality and prosperity in our country is sustained.

But it is an illusion. At the start of the coronavirus pandemic, I witnessed how Asian Americans can still be deemed as foreigners in the same place that heralds their success as the cause of others’ failures. The surge in hate crimes in our community shows that Asian Americans are still first and foremost seen for their skin color. The news article from which I learned about the killings in Atlanta said the shooter’s motive was unknown. He was a sex addict who hated women. I had the fleeting thought that race could have also been a coincidence in this case–the situation was complicated, right? There were so many factors involved in this tragedy, but I could no longer ignore that race was the driving one.

For all the times I was hurt, scared, enraged, and struggling with internalized racism, I have finally recognized who I am in America, an Asian woman. It’s a lot to take in–all the recent violence and the realization that it’s the right thing to challenge unjust systems. That it’s right to address racial inequities and call discrimination by its name. 

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The Sins of the Educated Class

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

When I was young, I was a man on the left. In the early 1980s, I used to go to the library and read early-20th-century issues of left-wing magazines like The Masses and The New Republic. I was energized by stories of workers fighting for their rights against the elites — at Haymarket, at the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, on the railways where the Pullman sleeping car porters struggled for decent wages a few years after that. My heroes were all on the left: John Reed, Clifford Odets, Frances Perkins and Hubert Humphrey.

But I got out of college and realized we didn’t live in the industrial age; we live in the information age. The center of progressive energy moved from the working class to the universities, and not just any universities, but the elite universities.

By now we’re used to the fact that the elite universities are places that attract and produce progressives. Working-class voters now mostly support Donald Trump, but at Harvard, America’s richest university, 65 percent of students identify as progressive or very progressive, according to a May 2023 survey of the graduating class.

Today we’re used to the fact that elite places are shifting further and further to the left. Writing for The Harvard Crimson, Julien Berman used A.I. to analyze opinion pieces in college newspapers for their ideological content. “Opinions of student writers at elite universities” in 2000, he found , “weren’t all that more progressive than those at nonelite ones.” But by 2023, opinions at The Crimson had grown about two and a half times more progressive than they were in 2001. More generally, Berman concluded, “Opinion sections at elite universities have gotten significantly more progressive, and they’ve outrun their nonelite counterparts.”

Today, we’re used to the fact that students at elite universities have different interests and concerns from students at less privileged places. Marc Novicoff and Robert Kelchen in May published an investigative report in The Washington Monthly titled “Are Gaza Protests Happening Mostly at Elite Colleges?” They surveyed 1,421 public and private colleges and concluded, “The answer is a resounding yes.”

A few schools with a large number of lower-income students, they found, had Gaza protests, “but in the vast majority of cases, campuses that educate students mostly from working-class backgrounds have not had any protest activity.” Among private schools, encampments and protests “have taken place almost exclusively at schools where poorer students are scarce and the listed tuitions and fees are exorbitantly high.”

I went to an elite university and have taught at them. I find them wonderful in most ways and deeply screwed up in a few ways. But over the decades and especially recently, I’ve found the elite, educated-class progressivism a lot less attractive than the working-class progressivism of Frances Perkins that I read about when I was young. Like a lot of people, I’ve looked on with a kind of dismay as elite university dynamics have spread across national life and politics, making America worse in all sorts of ways. Let me try to be more specific about these dynamics.

The first is false consciousness. To be progressive is to be against privilege. But today progressives dominate elite institutions like the exclusive universities, the big foundations and the top cultural institutions. American adults who identify as very progressive skew white, well educated and urban and hail from relatively advantaged backgrounds.

This is the contradiction of the educated class. Virtue is defined by being anti-elite. But today’s educated class constitutes the elite, or at least a big part of it. Many of the curiosities of our culture flow as highly educated people try to resolve the contradiction between their identity as an enemy of privilege, and the fact that, at least educationally and culturally, and often economically, they are privileged.

Imagine you’re a social justice-oriented student or a radical sociologist, but you attend or work at a university with a $50 billion endowment, immense social power and the ability to reject about 95 percent of the people who apply. For years or decades, you worked your tail off to get into the most exclusive aeries in American life, but now you’ve got to prove, to yourself and others, that you’re on the side of the oppressed.

Imagine you graduated from a prestigious liberal arts college with a degree in history and you get a job as a teacher at an elite Manhattan private school. You’re a sincere progressive down to your bones. Unfortunately, your job is to take the children of rich financiers and polish them up so they can get into Stanford. In other words, your literal job is to reinforce privilege.

This sort of cognitive dissonance often has a radicalizing effect. When your identity is based on siding with the marginalized, but you work at Horace Mann or Princeton, you have to work really hard to make yourself and others believe you are really progressive. You’re bound to drift further and further to the left to prove you are standing up to the man.

This, I think, explains the following phenomenon: Society pours hundreds of thousands of dollars into elite students, gives them the most prestigious launching pads fathomable, and they are often the ones talking most loudly about burning the system down.

This also explains, I think, the leftward drift of the haute bourgeoisie. As the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi puts it in his forthcoming book, “ We Have Never Been Woke ”: “After 2011, there were dramatic changes in how highly educated white liberals answered questions related to race and ethnicity. These shifts were not matched among non-liberal or non-Democrat whites, nor among nonwhites of any political or ideological persuasion. By 2020, highly educated white liberals tended to provide more ‘woke’ responses to racial questions than the average Black or Hispanic person.”

Progressivism has practically become an entry ticket into the elite. A few years ago, a Yale admissions officer wrote, “For those students who come to Yale, we expect them to be versed in issues of social justice.” Recently Tufts included an optional essay prompt that explicitly asked applicants what they were doing to advance social justice.

Over the years the share of progressive students and professors has steadily risen, and the share of conservatives has approached zero. Progressives have created places where they never have to encounter beliefs other than their own. At Harvard, 82 percent of progressives say that all or almost all of their close friends share their political beliefs.

A lot of us in the center left or the center right don’t want to live amid this much conformity. We don’t see history as a zero-sum war between oppressor and oppressed. We still believe in a positive-sum society where all people can see their lives improve together.

The second socially harmful dynamic is what you might call the cultural consequences of elite overproduction. Over the past few decades, elite universities have been churning out very smart graduates who are ready to use their minds and sensibilities to climb to the top of society and change the world. Unfortunately, the marketplace isn’t producing enough of the kinds of jobs these graduates think they deserve.

The elite college grads who go into finance, consulting and tech do smashingly well, but the grads who choose less commercial sectors often struggle. Social activists in Washington and other centers of influence have to cope with sky-high rents. Newspapers and other news websites are laying off journalists. Academics who had expected to hold a prestigious chair find themselves slaving away as adjunct professors.

In a series of essays culminating in his book “End Times: Elites, Counter Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration,” Peter Turchin argued that periods of elite overproduction lead to a rising tide of social decay as alienated educated-class types wage ever more ferocious power struggles with other elites. This phenomenon most likely contributed to surges in social protest during the late 1960s, the late 1980s and then around 2010. Research using Google nGrams shows that discourse mentioning “racism” spiked around each of these three periods.

Elite overproduction was especially powerful during the period after the financial crisis. In the early 2010s, highly educated white liberals increasingly experienced a disproportionate rise in depression, anxiety and negative emotions. This was accompanied by a sharp shift to the left in their political views. The spread of cancel culture and support for decriminalizing illegal immigration and “defunding the police” were among the quintessential luxury beliefs that seemed out of touch to people in less privileged parts of society. Those people often responded by making a sharp countershift in the populist direction, contributing to the election of Donald Trump and to his continued political viability today.

As a nonprogressive member of the educated class, I’d say that elite overproduction induces people on the left and the right to form their political views around their own sense of personal grievance and alienation. It launches unhappy progressives and their populist enemies into culture war battles that help them feel engaged, purposeful and good about themselves, but it seems to me that these battles are often more about performative self-validation than they are about practical policies that might serve the common good.

The third dynamic is the inflammation of the discourse. The information age has produced a vast cohort of people (including me) who live by trafficking in ideas — academics, journalists, activists, foundation employees, consultants and the various other shapers of public opinion. People in other sectors measure themselves according to whether they can build houses or care for seniors in a nursing home, but people in our crowd often measure ourselves by our beliefs — having the right beliefs, pioneering new beliefs, staying up-to-date on the latest beliefs, vanquishing the beliefs we have decided are the wrong beliefs.

Nothing is more unstable than a fashionable opinion. If your status is defined by your opinions, you’re living in a world of perpetual insecurity, perpetual mental and moral war. The man who saw all this coming was the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who started his major works with a book called “Distinction” in 1979.

Bourdieu argued that just as economic capitalists use their resource — wealth — to amass prestige and power, people who form the educated class and the cultural elite, symbolic capitalists, use our resources — beliefs, fancy degrees, linguistic abilities — to amass prestige, power and, if we can get it, money.

Symbolic capitalists, Bourdieu continued, wage daily battles of consecration, battles over what will be admired and what will be disdained, who gets to be counted among the elect and who is counted among the damned.

Bourdieu’s work is so powerful because it shows how symbolic capitalists turned political postures into power tools that enable them to achieve social, cultural and economic might. If exchanging viewpoints is turned into a struggle for social position, then of course conversation will assume the brutality of all primate dominance contests.

These sorts of battles for symbolic consecration are now the water in which many of us highly educated Americans swim. In the absence of religious beliefs, these moral wars give people a genuine sense of meaning and purpose. They give people a way of acting in the world that they hope will shift beliefs and produce a better society.

But it’s awful to live in a perpetual state of cultural war, and it’s awful to live in a continual state of social fear. The inflammation of the discourse serves the psychic and social self-interests of the combatants, but it polarizes society by rendering a lot of people in the center silent, causing them to keep their heads down in order to survive.

Will these three dynamics continue to drive American society batty?

I can tell a story in which those of us in the educated class, progressive or not, come to address the social, political and economic divides we have unwittingly created.

In this reality we would face up to the fact that all societies have been led by this or that elite group and that in the information age those who have a lot of education have immense access to political, cultural and economic power. We would be honest about our role in widening inequalities. We would abhor cultural insularity and go out of our way to engage with people across ideology and class. We would live up to our responsibilities as elites and care for the whole country, not just ourselves. Most important, we would dismantle the arrangements that enable people in our class to pass down our educational privileges to our children, generation after generation, while locking out most everyone else.

That would mean changing the current college admissions criteria, so they no longer massively favor affluent young kids whose parents invest in them from birth. That would also mean opening up many other pathways so that more people would find it easier to climb the social ladder even if they didn’t get into a selective college at age 18.

But there is another possible future. Perhaps today’s educated elite is just like any other historical elite. We gained our status by exploiting or not even seeing others down below, and we are sure as hell not going to give up any of our status without a fight.

To see how likely this second possibility is, I urge you to preorder al-Gharbi’s “We Have Never Been Woke.” It comes out this fall, and it announces him as a rising intellectual star.

I really can’t tell what al-Gharbi’s politics are — some mixture of positions from across the spectrum maybe. He does note that he is writing from the tradition of Black thinkers — stretching back to W.E.B. Du Bois — who argue that white liberals use social justice issues to build status and make themselves feel good while ultimately offering up “little more than symbolic gestures and platitudes to redress the material harms they decry (and often exacerbate).”

He observes that today’s educated-class activists are conveniently content to restrict their political action to the realm of symbols. In his telling, land acknowledgments — when people open public events by naming the Indigenous peoples who had their land stolen from them — are the quintessential progressive gesture.

It’s often non-Indigenous people signaling their virtue to other non-Indigenous people while doing little or nothing for the descendants of those who were actually displaced. Educated elites rename this or that school to erase the names of disfavored historical figures, but they don’t improve the education that goes on within them. Student activists stage messy protests on campus but don’t even see the custodial staff who will clean up afterward.

Al-Gharbi notes that Black people made most of their progress between the late 1940s and the mid-1960s, before the rise of the educated class in the late 1960s, and that the educated class may have derailed that progress. He notes that gaps in wealth and homeownership between white and Black Americans have grown larger since 1968.

He suggests that educated elites practice their own form of trickle-down economics. They imagine that giving diverse college grads university administration jobs and other social justice sinecures will magically benefit the disadvantaged people who didn’t go to college.

He charges that while members of the educated class do a lot of moral preening, their lifestyles contribute to the immiserations of the people who have nearly been rendered invisible — the Amazon warehouse worker, the DoorDash driver making $1.75 an hour after taxes and expenses.

That rumbling sound you hear is the possibility of a multiracial, multiprong, right/left alliance against the educated class. Donald Trump has already created the nub of this kind of movement but is himself too polarizing to create a genuinely broad-based populist movement. After Trump is off the stage, it’s very possible to imagine such an uprising.

Ruh-roh. The lesson for those of us in the educated class is to seriously reform the system we have created or be prepared to be run over.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author, most recently,  of “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.” @ nytdavidbrooks

3 Nassau Seniors Win LI Essay Contest About Racism

SYOSSET, NY — A trio of Nassau County seniors won a Long Island-wide essay contest sponsored by ERASE Racism of Syosset.

Each winner of the "Raise Your Voice" contest will receive a $500 college scholarship.

• Shania Lall of Freeport High School wrote in her winning essay:

"School environments need to be rooted in DEI values to ensure that students are

abundantly educated in academics as well as racial morale. As a future speech

pathologist, I harbor an unwavering passion to inspire and guide underrepresented

children to secure their spot at the table and demand equity through confident

communication. An enrichment in communication and education will allow our youth to

create a new norm for minorities: strength, success, and greatness beyond wealth."

• Maekyla Massey of Baldwin High School wrote:

"Growing up on Long Island, I’ve experienced firsthand the impacts of structural racism and Long Island’s longstanding history of racial segregation. As a public school student, I attend a majority-minority school district in which resources are not as abundant as those given to students in school districts like Garden City and Merrick, which are districts just a few miles away from where I live. The local school district's funding model, which relies on property taxes, is intrinsically racist, especially in light of the racist redlining policies that were prevalent on Long Island a few decades ago."

• Aidan Morgan of Malverne High School wrote:

"A multifaceted approach is needed to increase the effectiveness of inclusive education. Classroom discussions like those mentioned should be more frequent and structured in a way that encourages active participation from all students. In addition, the inclusion of iinclusive topics in different subjects of the curriculum can strengthen their importance and relevance in everyday life. Beyond the classroom, broader strategies are needed to develop an inclusive and equitable learning environment. Implementing comprehensive diversity training for teachers at the district level can give them the tools they need to navigate sensitive topics and create inclusive spaces. In addition, creating support networks for marginalized students, such as kinship groups or peer tutoring programs, can provide a sense of belonging and empowerment."

ERASE Racism is a civil rights organization based on Long Island that exposes and addresses the

devastating impact of historical and ongoing structural racism, particularly in public school

education and housing.

Each student will be celebrated at ERASE Racism's annual benefit on Wednesday.

The article 3 Nassau Seniors Win LI Essay Contest About Racism appeared first on Rockville Centre Patch .

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The Donald Trump I Saw on The Apprentice

For 20 years, i couldn’t say what i watched the former president do on the set of the show that changed everything. now i can..

On Jan. 8, 2004, just more than 20 years ago, the first episode of The Apprentice aired. It was called “Meet the Billionaire,” and 18 million people watched. The episodes that followed climbed to roughly 20 million each week. A staggering 28 million viewers tuned in to watch the first season finale. The series won an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Reality-Competition Program, and the Television Critics Association called it one of the best TV shows of the year, alongside The Sopranos and Arrested Development . The series—alongside its bawdy sibling, The Celebrity Apprentice —appeared on NBC in coveted prime-time slots for more than a decade.

The Apprentice was an instant success in another way too. It elevated Donald J. Trump from sleazy New York tabloid hustler to respectable household name. In the show, he appeared to demonstrate impeccable business instincts and unparalleled wealth, even though his businesses had barely survived multiple bankruptcies and faced yet another when he was cast. By carefully misleading viewers about Trump—his wealth, his stature, his character, and his intent—the competition reality show set about an American fraud that would balloon beyond its creators’ wildest imaginations.

I should know. I was one of four producers involved in the first two seasons. During that time, I signed an expansive nondisclosure agreement that promised a fine of $5 million and even jail time if I were to ever divulge what actually happened. It expired this year.

No one involved in The Apprentice —from the production company or the network, to the cast and crew—was involved in a con with malicious intent. It was a TV show , and it was made for entertainment . I still believe that. But we played fast and loose with the facts, particularly regarding Trump, and if you were one of the 28 million who tuned in, chances are you were conned.

As Trump answers for another of his alleged deception schemes in New York and gears up to try to persuade Americans to elect him again, in part thanks to the myth we created, I can finally tell you what making Trump into what he is today looked like from my side. Most days were revealing. Some still haunt me, two decades later.

Nearly everything I ever learned about deception I learned from my friend Apollo Robbins. He’s been called a professional pickpocket, but he’s actually a “perceptions expert.” Apollo has spent his life studying the psychology of how we distort other people’s perceptions of reality and has done so by picking pockets onstage for the entertainment of others. He is a master of deception, a skill that made him, back in the day, the so-called best-kept secret in Las Vegas. After “fanning” his marks with casual, unobtrusive touch designed to make them feel safe or at ease, Apollo determines where the items reside—the wallet inside a breast pocket, the Rolex fastened to a wrist—and he removes these items without detection. He’ll even tell you what he intends to steal before he does it. He does this not to hurt people or bewilder them with a puzzle but to challenge their maps of reality. The results are marvelous. A lot of magic is designed to appeal to people visually, but what he’s trying to affect is your mind, your moods, your perceptions.

As a producer working in unscripted, or “reality,” television, I have the same goal. Like Apollo, I want to entertain, make people joyful, maybe even challenge their ways of thinking. But because I often lack the cinematic power of a movie, with its visual pyrotechnics or rehearsed dialogue, I rely on shaping the perceptions of viewers, manipulating their maps of reality toward something I want them to think or feel.

The presumption is that reality TV is scripted. What actually happens is the illusion of reality by staging situations against an authentic backdrop. The more authentic it is to, say, have a 40-foot wave bearing down on a crab boat in the Bering Sea for Deadliest Catch , the more we can trick you into thinking a malevolent Russian trawler is out there messing with the crabber’s bait. There is a trick to it, and when it works, you feel as if you’re watching a scripted show. Although very few programs are out-and-out fake, there is deception at play in every single reality program. The producers and editors are ostensibly con artists, distracting you with grand notions while we steal from you your precious time.

But the real con that drove The Apprentice is far older than television. The “pig in the poke” comes from an idiom dating to 1555: “I’ll never buy a pig in a poke / There’s many a foul pig in a fair cloak.” It refers to the time-honored scam of selling a suckling pig at market but handing over a bag (the poke) to the purchaser, who never looks inside it. Eventually, he discovers he’s purchased something quite different.

Our show became a 21 st -century version. It’s a long con played out over a decade of watching Trump dominate prime time by shouting orders, appearing to lead, and confidently firing some of the most capable people on television, all before awarding one eligible person a job. Audiences responded to Trump’s arrogance, his perceived abilities and prescience, but mostly his confidence . The centerpiece to any confidence game is precisely that— confidence .

As I walk into my interview for The Apprentice , I inadvertently learn how important it is for every one of us involved to demonstrate confidence above all else.

I sit down with Jay Bienstock, the showrunner, who has one last producer position to fill and needs somebody capable and hardworking. His office is sparse, and the desk is strategically placed directly across from the couch, with a noticeable angle downward from his desk to whomever is seated across from him. (I’m recalling all of the quoted conversations here to the best of my ability; they are not verbatim.)

He is smiling and even laughing throughout the interview, but from the steep angle at which he gazes down on me, there is no mistaking who is in charge. He seems to like what he hears and offers to follow up with my agent. “But I have to check your references before I can hire you,” he says. “You’d be crazy not to,” I reply. He laughs, claps his hands together, and grins. “ THAT’S what I’m talking about,” he says. “That’s the confidence this show needs!”

I sit there, several inches below eyeline, and ponder what just happened. What, I wonder, is so “confident” about suggesting he’d be crazy to not check my references? Then it dawns on me. He thinks I meant “You’d be crazy not to hire me.” The signal to noise begins.

Listen to Bill Pruitt discuss this story on What Next , Slate’s daily news podcast:

Before I leave, I have to ask: Why Trump? Bienstock discovers that we both lived in New York for a time. Knowing what we know about Trump, selling the idea that intelligent people would compete to land a job working for him will be a challenge.

“The idea is to have a new and different billionaire every season—just like there’s a new and different island on Survivor . We reached out to Spielberg, Katzenberg, Geffen, among others,” he says. “Trump is the only one who agreed to sign on.” (Bienstock didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

“We’ll make it work,” Bienstock says confidently. I rise, shake his hand, and leave, and head over to Dutton’s bookstore to pick up a used copy of Trump’s The Art of the Deal . It is filled with takeaways about branding and strategizing but conveniently omits Trump bluffing his way through meetings with contractors, stiffing them when it is convenient to do so, and betraying his most trusted colleagues to get what he wants. (The book’s ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, has since tried to get the bestseller recategorized in the Library of Congress as a work of fiction.)

Another show of confidence is the budget the series commands. It’s not as expensive as a scripted series, but for a reality show, the price is high. Never have I worked on a series with this level of funding, but the cost is justified. This needs to feel real.

New York City is the perfect—though expensive—backdrop. Trump’s actual offices are, however, less than telegenic. They are cramped, and a lot of the wood furniture is chipped or peeling. None of it is suitable to appear on camera. We need what grifters call the Big Store: a fake but authentic-looking establishment in which the con goes down. Trump Tower, at the time, is mostly condos and some offices situated in the high-rise. The mezzanine comprises vacant and overpriced retail space, all of it unfinished. Trump offers the space to the production—at a premium, naturally—and it is inside this location that we create our own “reception area” with doors leading to a fake, dimly lit, and appropriately ominous-feeling “boardroom.”

Next door, there’s the “suite” where the contestants will live, which is made to look like a trendy loft-style apartment they all share. The lodgings are made up of partitions surrounding tiny, hard bunks upon which the candidates sleep; the illusion comes from elegantly appointed common areas, where most of the interplay will go down.

During a tour of the set, I have my first encounter with Trump. I leave the suite and enter the gear room, the only vacant retail space that will remain unfinished. It is filled with equipment and crew members milling about. In walks a trio of men. In the middle is Trump, in a navy blue suit and scarlet tie. He’s surprisingly tall, and not just because of the hair. He is flanked by two even taller men. Bienstock makes introductions, and I watch as Trump shakes hands with everyone. I’d been told he would never do this, something about fearing unwanted germs. When it is my turn, I decide on the convivial two-hander and place my right hand into his and my left onto his wrist as we shake. His eye contact is limited but thorough. He is sizing me up. He looks like a wolf about to rip my throat out before turning away, offering me my first glimpse at the superstructure—his hairstyle—buttressed atop his head with what must be gallons of Aqua Net.

I watch as Trump saunters around the room, snatches up a fistful of M&Ms from the craft service table set aside for the crew, and shoves them into his mouth. Then he is gone, ushered away toward some important meeting he must attend, as if to say, to one and all present, This is unimportant .

Eventually, it’s time to roll cameras. When Trump is called to perform, we are filming the first scene of the first episode on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and he is about to deliver the first task. Filming inside this beacon of capitalism and wealth gives the series the legitimacy it needs. A con artist would call staging the scam inside a legitimate institution “playing a man against the wall.”

From the balcony overlooking the famed trading room floor, Trump will set up the entire premise of the show on camera and engage in a little banter with the other participants. This includes introducing his advisers, George Ross, an older, grouchy attorney devoted to Trump’s legal affairs, and Carolyn Kepcher, a perpetual skeptic who runs his hospitality units and one of his golf clubs. (They might be called “the shills,” others in on the con who will act as Trump’s eyes and ears.)

The contestants are there, lined up and zeroed in on by camera operators getting reaction shots to whatever it is Trump says. Although they mostly just stand and wait, they patiently go along with the proceedings. They are not in on the con. They act as “the little blind mice,” who, in fraudster terms, convey a sense of authenticity by reacting to the goings-on, like lab rats caught in a maze.

Nothing is scripted—except for what Trump needs to say. Cue cards are present, but mostly it is Bienstock running up, coaching Trump, tossing out suggestions from the script he has written for the man. The feeling is that while doing a fair job of repeating the necessary words verbatim, Trump also appears to be inadvertently shouting at the contestants. His hands shuttle back and forth as if holding an invisible accordion, a gesture now famous in memes .

Each episode is filmed over three days. For the first episode, the two teams of contestants, divided by gender, take to the streets to carry out the initial task of trying to sell lemonade for the most money. The women pulverize the men.

Having won, the women are invited upstairs for a direct look at Trump’s very own apartment in Trump Tower, a reward designed specifically to introduce viewers to the gaudy but elevated world of Donald Trump at home. The men, who lost, go back to the loft to await their fate at the hands of Trump. He will be sending one of them home.

Inside the now-empty boardroom set, a meeting with the producers is called for the first briefing of Trump before the anticipated firing. With Trump are his cronies, Ross and Kepcher. Trump is “too busy,” so they have each observed both teams in the field and make an assessment of who prevailed and who fell behind.

Now, this is important. The Apprentice is a game show regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. In the 1950s, scandals arose when producers of quiz shows fed answers to likable, ratings-generating contestants while withholding those answers from unlikable but truly knowledgeable players. Any of us involved in The Apprentice swinging the outcome of prize money by telling Trump whom to fire is forbidden.

Considering this, Bienstock wisely chooses to record these off-camera briefings in case the FCC ever rolls up on us. Rather than blurt out who they think should get canned, the two producers of that week’s episode—each following one team—are coached to equitably share with Trump the virtues and deficiencies of each member of the losing team. This renders a balanced depiction of how and why they lost. There are obvious choices of whom to fire, but we want it to be something of a horse race, to sustain the drama and keep people watching.

Satisfied he has what he needs, Trump dismisses the prefiring discussion with the wave of a hand, claiming he has places to be, let’s get on with it, etc. We proceed to set up for what will be our first boardroom.

The producers retreat to the adjacent control room to watch the event unfold. Per the show’s format, the losing team is summoned in anticipation of one of its members being sent home. Leaving their luggage in the reception area, the men walk into the boardroom, where Trump is flanked by Ross and Kepcher, waiting for them solemnly. Trump just frowns from a gigantic red leather chair, his eyeline noticeably well above those sitting across from him.

The men proceed to verbally go after one another like gladiators jousting before the emperor. Trump takes the conversation into potentially dangerous terrain, asking one contestant, who is Jewish, whether he believes in “the genetic pool.” The contestant’s retort is swift and resolute: He tells Trump that he does, in fact, have the genes, “just like you got from your father, Fred Trump, and your mother, Mary Trump.” It pours out of him. It is dramatic. It is good reality TV.

The project manager must then choose two of the men to come back to the boardroom with him while everyone else is dismissed. An off-camera prefiring consultation with Trump takes place (and is recorded), right before the three men are brought back for the eventual firing. We film Trump, Ross, and Kepcher deliberating and giving the pluses and minuses of each, remarking on how risky it was for one of the contestants to stand up for himself the way that he did. Trump turns back and forth to each, listening. His cronies stick to their stories and give added deferential treatment toward Trump, with Ross strategically reminding him, “You’ve been taking risks your entire life.”

Trump summons the three men back into the boardroom for final judging. Trump grills one and says, “I will let you stay.” ( Wow! we think. A benevolent leader. ) When he turns his attention to the other man—the one he asked about genetics—it looks clear. He is doomed. So much so that the man stands when Trump tells him, “It seems unanimous.” Trump then offhandedly tells him to sit down, calling him “a wild card,” echoing Ross’ earlier observation of the boss, Trump.

After this comes an unwieldy moment when, at the behest of Bienstock, Trump fumbles through a given line. “We have an elevator,” he says to the remaining contestant, named David, “that goes up to the suite and an elevator that goes down”—he pauses to recall the exact wording—“to the street. And, David, I’m going to ask you to take the down elevator.”

The men react and awkwardly rise. It is an unsatisfactory conclusion, given all the preceding drama.

From the control room, we all watch as the three men depart the boardroom. A quick huddle takes place between the producers and the executive from NBC. We bolt from the control room out into the boardroom and confer with Trump, telling him we will need him to say something more direct to conclude the moment when David is let go.

“Well, I’d probably just fire him,” Trump says. “Why not just say that?” Bienstock asks. “Fine,” Trump says.

We return to the control room. The three men from the losing team are brought back into the boardroom, and Trump repeats his line about the elevator, then turns to David, who already knows his fate, and adds, “David, you’re fired.”

The line insertion happened in a perilously scripted way, but it is deemed satisfactory. “You’re fired” becomes the expression we will stick with. It works. Trump comes off as decisive and to the point.

Later, Trump will try to trademark “You’re fired.” He is not successful.

Trump’s appearances make up so little of our shooting schedule that whenever he shows up to film, it isn’t just the wild-card on-camera moments we both hope for and are terrified of that put everyone on edge. It is the way he, the star (and half owner) of the show, targets people on the crew with the gaze of a hungry lion.

While leering at a female camera assistant or assessing the physical attributes of a female contestant for whoever is listening, he orders a female camera operator off an elevator on which she is about to film him. “She’s too heavy,” I hear him say.

Another female camera operator, who happens to have blond hair and blue eyes, draws from Trump comparisons to his own Ivanka Trump. “There’s a beautiful woman behind that camera,” he says toward a line of 10 different operators set up in the foyer of Trump Tower one day. “That’s all I want to look at.”

Trump corners a female producer and asks her whom he should fire. She demurs, saying something about how one of the contestants blamed another for their team losing. Trump then raises his hands, cupping them to his chest: “You mean the one with the …?” He doesn’t know the contestant’s name. Trump eventually fires her.

(In response to detailed questions about this and other incidents reported in this article, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for the Trump 2024 campaign, wrote, “This is a completely fabricated and bullshit story that was already peddled in 2016.” He said that it is surfacing now because Democrats are “desperate.”)

Trump goes about knocking off every one of the contestants in the boardroom until only two remain. The finalists are Kwame Jackson, a Black broker from Goldman Sachs, and Bill Rancic, a white entrepreneur from Chicago who runs his own cigar business. Trump assigns them each a task devoted to one of his crown-jewel properties. Jackson will oversee a Jessica Simpson benefit concert at Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City, while Rancic will oversee a celebrity golf tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

Viewers need to believe that whatever Trump touches turns to gold. These properties that bear his name are supposed to glitter and gleam. All thanks to him.

Reality is another matter altogether. The lights in the casino’s sign are out. Hong Kong investors actually own the place—Trump merely lends his name. The carpet stinks, and the surroundings for Simpson’s concert are ramshackle at best. We shoot around all that.

Both Rancic and Jackson do a round-robin recruitment of former contestants, and Jackson makes the fateful decision to team up with the notorious Omarosa, among others, to help him carry out his final challenge.

With her tenure on the series nearly over, Omarosa launches several simultaneous attacks on her fellow teammates in support of her “brother” Kwame. For the fame-seeking beauty queen, it is a do-or-die play for some much-coveted screen time. As on previous tasks, Ross and Kepcher will observe both events.

Over at Trump National Golf Club, where I am stationed, it is sunny and bright, set against luscious fall colors. I am driven up to the golf club from Manhattan to scout. With me are the other producers, all of whom are men. We meet Trump at one of the homes he keeps for himself on the grounds of the club.

“Melania doesn’t even know about this place,” he says out loud to us, snickering, implying that the home’s function is as his personal lair for his sexual exploits, all of which are unknown to his then-fiancée Melania Knauss.

We are taken around the rest of the club’s property and told what to feature on camera and what to stay away from. The clubhouse is a particularly necessary inclusion, and it is inside these luxurious confines where I have the privilege of meeting the architect. Finding myself alone with him, I make a point of commending him for what I feel is a remarkable building. The place is genuinely spectacular. He thanks me.

“It’s bittersweet,” he tells me. “I’m very proud of this place, but …” He hesitates. “I wasn’t paid what was promised,” he says. I just listen. “Trump pays half upfront,” he says, “but he’ll stiff you for the rest once the project is completed.”

“He stiffed you?”

“If I tried to sue, the legal bills would be more than what I was owed. He knew that. He basically said Take what I’m offering ,” and I see how heavy this is for the man, all these years later. “So, we sent the invoice. He didn’t even pay that,” he says. None of this will be in the show. Not Trump’s suggested infidelities, nor his aversion toward paying those who work for him.

When the tasks are over, we are back in the boardroom, having our conference with Trump about how the two finalists compare—a conversation that I know to be recorded. We huddle around him and set up the last moments of the candidates, Jackson and Rancic.

Trump will make his decision live on camera months later, so what we are about to film is the setup to that reveal. The race between Jackson and Rancic should seem close, and that’s how we’ll edit the footage. Since we don’t know who’ll be chosen, it must appear close, even if it’s not.

We lay out the virtues and deficiencies of each finalist to Trump in a fair and balanced way, but sensing the moment at hand, Kepcher sort of comes out of herself. She expresses how she observed Jackson at the casino overcoming more obstacles than Rancic, particularly with the way he managed the troublesome Omarosa. Jackson, Kepcher maintains, handled the calamity with grace.

“I think Kwame would be a great addition to the organization,” Kepcher says to Trump, who winces while his head bobs around in reaction to what he is hearing and clearly resisting.

“Why didn’t he just fire her?” Trump asks, referring to Omarosa. It’s a reasonable question. Given that this the first time we’ve ever been in this situation, none of this is something we expected.

“That’s not his job,” Bienstock says to Trump. “That’s yours.” Trump’s head continues to bob.

“I don’t think he knew he had the ability to do that,” Kepcher says. Trump winces again.

“Yeah,” he says to no one in particular, “but, I mean, would America buy a n— winning?”

Kepcher’s pale skin goes bright red. I turn my gaze toward Trump. He continues to wince. He is serious, and he is adamant about not hiring Jackson.

Bienstock does a half cough, half laugh, and swiftly changes the topic or throws to Ross for his assessment. What happens next I don’t entirely recall. I am still processing what I have just heard. We all are. Only Bienstock knows well enough to keep the train moving. None of us thinks to walk out the door and never return. I still wish I had. (Bienstock and Kepcher didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

Afterward, we film the final meeting in the boardroom, where Jackson and Rancic are scrutinized by Trump, who, we already know, favors Rancic. Then we wrap production, pack up, and head home. There is no discussion about what Trump said in the boardroom, about how the damning evidence was caught on tape. Nothing happens.

We go home and face the next phase of our assignment, the editing. In stitching the footage together, the swindle we are now involved in ascends to new levels.

Editing in a reality TV show is what script writing is to a narrative series. A lot of effort goes into the storytelling because, basically, in every single unscripted series—whether it’s a daytime talk show, an adventure documentary, or a shiny floor dance-off—there are three versions: There’s what happens, there’s what gets filmed, and there’s what gets cut down into 43 minutes squeezed between commercial breaks. Especially for a competition series, it’s important that the third version represent the first as much as possible. A defeated contestant could show up in the press and cry foul if they’re misrepresented. Best to let people fail of their own accord. That said, we look after our prized possessions in how we edit the series, and some people fare better than others.

We attend to our thesis that only the best and brightest deserve a job working for Donald Trump. Luckily, the winner, Bill Rancic, and his rival, Kwame Jackson, come off as capable and confident throughout the season. If for some reason they had not, we would have conveniently left their shortcomings on the cutting room floor. In actuality, both men did deserve to win.

Without a doubt, the hardest decisions we faced in postproduction were how to edit together sequences involving Trump. We needed him to sound sharp, dignified, and clear on what he was looking for and not as if he was yelling at people. You see him today: When he reads from a teleprompter, he comes off as loud and stoic. Go to one of his rallies and he’s the off-the-cuff rambler rousing his followers into a frenzy. While filming, he struggled to convey even the most basic items. But as he became more comfortable with filming, Trump made raucous comments he found funny or amusing—some of them misogynistic as well as racist. We cut those comments. Go to one of his rallies today and you can hear many of them.

If you listen carefully, especially to that first episode, you will notice clearly altered dialogue from Trump in both the task delivery and the boardroom. Trump was overwhelmed with remembering the contestants’ names, the way they would ride the elevator back upstairs or down to the street, the mechanics of what he needed to convey. Bienstock instigated additional dialogue recording that came late in the edit phase. We set Trump up in the soundproof boardroom set and fed him lines he would read into a microphone with Bienstock on the phone, directing from L.A. And suddenly Trump knows the names of every one of the contestants and says them while the camera cuts to each of their faces. Wow , you think, how does he remember everyone’s name? While on location, he could barely put a sentence together regarding how a task would work. Listen now, and he speaks directly to what needs to happen while the camera conveniently cuts away to the contestants, who are listening and nodding. He sounds articulate and concise through some editing sleight of hand.

Then comes the note from NBC about the fact that after Trump delivers the task assignment to the contestants, he disappears from the episode after the first act and doesn’t show up again until the next-to-last. That’s too long for the (high-priced) star of the show to be absent.

There is a convenient solution. At the top of the second act, right after the task has been assigned but right before the teams embark on their assignment, we insert a sequence with Trump, seated inside his gilded apartment, dispensing a carefully crafted bit of wisdom. He speaks to whatever the theme of each episode is—why someone gets fired or what would lead to a win. The net effect is not only that Trump appears once more in each episode but that he also now seems prophetic in how he just knows the way things will go right or wrong with each individual task. He comes off as all-seeing and all-knowing. We are led to believe that Donald Trump is a natural-born leader.

Through the editorial nudge we provide him, Trump prevails. So much so that NBC asks for more time in the boardroom to appear at the end of all the remaining episodes. (NBC declined to comment for this article.)

When it comes to the long con, the cherry on top is the prologue to the premiere. It’s a five-minute-long soliloquy delivered by Trump at the beginning of the first episode, the one titled “Meet the Billionaire.” Over a rousing score, it features Trump pulling out all the stops, calling New York “ my city” and confessing to crawling out from under “billions of dollars in debt.” There’s Trump in the back of limousines. Trump arriving before throngs of cheering crowds outside Trump Tower. Trump in his very own helicopter as it banks over midtown—the same helicopter with the Trump logo that, just like the airplane, is actually for sale to the highest bidder. The truth is, almost nothing was how we made it seem.

So, we scammed. We swindled. Nobody heard the racist and misogynistic comments or saw the alleged cheating, the bluffing, or his hair taking off in the wind. Those tapes, I’ve come to believe, will never be found.

No one lost their retirement fund or fell on hard times from watching The Apprentice . But Trump rose in stature to the point where he could finally eye a run for the White House, something he had intended to do all the way back in 1998. Along the way, he could now feed his appetite for defrauding the public with various shady practices.

In 2005 thousands of students enrolled in what was called Trump University, hoping to gain insight from the Donald and his “handpicked” professors. Each paid as much as $35,000 to listen to some huckster trade on Trump’s name. In a sworn affidavit, salesman Ronald Schnackenberg testified that Trump University was “fraudulent.” The scam swiftly went from online videoconferencing courses to live events held by high-pressure sales professionals whose only job was to persuade attendees to sign up for the course. The sales were for the course “tuition” and had nothing whatsoever to do with real estate investments. A class action suit was filed against Trump.

That same year, Trump was caught bragging to Access Hollywood co-host Billy Bush that he likes to grab married women “by the pussy,” adding, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” He later tried to recruit porn actor Stormy Daniels for The Apprentice despite her profession and, according to Daniels, had sex with her right after his last son was born. (His alleged attempt to pay off Daniels is, of course, the subject of his recent trial.)

In October 2016—a month before the election—the Access Hollywood tapes were released and written off as “locker room banter.” Trump paid Daniels to keep silent about their alleged affair. He paid $25 million to settle the Trump University lawsuit and make it go away.

He went on to become the first elected president to possess neither public service nor military experience. And although he lost the popular vote, Trump beat out Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, winning in the Rust Belt by just 80,000 votes.

Trump has been called the “reality TV president,” and not just because of The Apprentice . The Situation Room, where top advisers gathered, became a place for photo-ops, a bigger, better boardroom. Trump swaggered and cajoled, just as he had on the show. Whom would he listen to? Whom would he fire? Stay tuned. Trump even has his own spinoff, called the House of Representatives, where women hurl racist taunts and body-shame one another with impunity. The State of the Union is basically a cage fight. The demands of public office now include blowhard buffoonery.

I reached out to Apollo, the Vegas perceptions expert, to discuss all of this. He reminded me how if a person wants to manipulate the signal, they simply turn up the noise. “In a world that is so uncertain,” he said, “a confidence man comes along and fills in the blanks. The more confident they are, the more we’re inclined to go along with what they suggest.”

A reality TV show gave rise to an avaricious hustler, and a deal was made: Subvert the facts, look past the deficiencies, deceive where necessary, and prevail in the name of television ratings and good, clean fun.

Trump is making another run at the White House and is leading in certain polls. People I know enthusiastically support him and expect he’ll return to office. It’s not just hats, sneakers, a fragrance, or Bibles. Donald Trump is selling his vision of the world, and people are buying it.

Knowing all they know, how could these people still think he’s capable of being president of the United States?

Perhaps they watched our show and were conned by the pig in the poke.