President Trump’s law-and-order campaign rhetoric has been compared to Richard Nixon’s and George Wallace’s similar themes in 1968. But such appeals go much further back, to the US in the early 1800s.
Decades of diversity training has been a double-edged sword. It’s offered a chance for people of colour to advocate for more inclusive workplaces. But it’s done nothing to tackle structural racism.
Kamala Harris speaking via a screen to demonstrators at the protest against racism and police brutality on Aug. 28, 2020, in Washington, D.C.
Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images)
Black and Asian American communities have been portrayed as in opposition to each other. Multiracial Kamala Harris, both Asian American and Black, represents the potential for coalition building.
Charlottesville city workers drape a tarp over the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in 2018. Debate over removing the statue continues today.
AP Photo/Steve Helber, File
Once stripped of their symbolic power, problem monuments offer what educators call ‘teachable moments,’ helping people assess society’s current values and compare them with what mattered in the past.
Martin Luther King, Jr. giving his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech during the March in Washington, D.C., on 28 August 1963.
Wikimedia Commons
Despite case after case of systemic racism against Indigenous people, the AFL has not been able to rid itself of a problem that has caused so much grief to so many.
John James Audubon relied on African Americans and Native Americans to collect some specimens for his ‘Birds of America’ prints (shown: Florida cormorant), but never credited them.
National Audubon Society
US ideas about conservation center on walling off land from use. That approach often means expelling Indigenous and other poor people who may be its most effective caretakers.
Personal support workers are in high demand - as this sign from Markham, ON indicates. They are an integral part of the healthcare system, but are racialized and underpaid.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn
Personal support workers are crucial but under-appreciated in the health-care system. They are often subjected to racism, and they struggle to make ends meet while caring for our most vulnerable.
Kamala Harris, the Democratic vice presidential nominee.
Michael A. McCoy/Getty Images
While the debates about Kamala Harris’ multiraciality may seem new, they are similar to the commentary other high-profile mixed-race people in the US have received about their racial identities.
A protestor holds a sign at a Black Lives Matter protest in Charlotte, NC.
(Keith Helfrich/Unsplash)
Politicians and law enforcement engage in uncivil behaviour that undermines democratic society. Civility is a pre-requisite for empathy, and is essential for difficult conversations.
U.S. President Donald Trump joins Vice President Mike Pence on stage at the Republican National Convention at Fort McHenry National Monument and Historic Shrine in Baltimore on Aug. 26, 2020.
(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
To fill a convention with blatant racism, as the Republicans did in 2016, is bad enough. But, after four years of racist policies, a convention filled with subtle racism is perhaps more dangerous.
Sending in the feds to quell unrest often increases conflict on the ground, as it did this summer in Portland, Ore.
Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Kenosha is the latest US city to see federal agents patrolling its protests. History suggests that supplanting the local police with a militarized national force rarely works out well.
Black men are stopped by police in disproportionate numbers.
Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images
As the country reels from a series of killings of Black men by the police, two scholars report that their research shows that stops by police of Black men can hurt their families.
Former South African government minister Nomvula Mokonyane, a leading member of the ruling ANC, at the commission probing grand corruption.
Luba Lesolle/Gallo Images via Getty Images
Former professor Robin DiAngelo’s book ‘White Fragility’ takes a reductive view on whiteness. This simplistic approach privileges a U.S.-centric view and ignores global experiences of whiteness.
These boys working in a Georgia cotton mill were photographed in 1909.
Lewis Hine/The National Child Labor Committee Collection via Library of Congress
More than a fifth of US children were working in 1900, and many Americans saw nothing wrong with that. It took decades of activism and court battles plus economic upheaval to change course.
Theodore Roosevelt was one of many U.S. presidents who was racist.
Bettman/Getty
President Woodrow Wilson told Black leaders, ‘Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.’ He was one in a long line of racist American presidents.
An operation taking place in 1941 on South Side of Chicago.
Library of Congress
Research Fellow, Institute for Health & Sport, member of the Community, Identity and Displacement Research Network, and Co-convenor of the Olympic Research Network, Victoria University